Would someone hire a lawyer based on an ad pasted to a wall? What about a digital ad pasted to a virtual wall on the Web? In either case, the answer seems obvious to me. Thus, I do not understand why any lawyer would shell out good money to purchase advertising space on the new Web site, The Lawyers Wall. Set to launch Aug. 1, the site consists of five “walls” — the front wall, west wall, east wall, north wall and south wall. Each wall is a Web page criss-crossed with a grid. Each empty square on the grid is 20 x 20 pixels (or 400 pixels) and represents available wall space that you can purchase to post your ad. Once you’ve registered, you drag your mouse to select the squares you want and a pop-up window calculates the purchase price. Space on the front wall, for example, is $9.95 per block per year. Other walls are $5.95 per block per year. So if you select a 15-block space on the front page, your annual cost would be $149.25. You can upload your own artwork and change it as often as you like during the year.

But what you end up with, assuming some of this space gets sold, is your ad stuck in among other lawyers’ ads on this virtual wall. Unless you buy a huge space, your ad would be just one of the crowd. Since the point of marketing is to make yourself stand out from the crowd, this site makes no sense to me. On top of that, I don’t see anything here to draw traffic. Why would a consumer come to this site in the first place?

The founders of this site have other walls for other markets — The Guitar Wall, The Auto Wall and The Apartment Wall, for example. But as a medium for lawyer marketing, this one seems to hit a brick wall.

Photo of Bob Ambrogi Bob Ambrogi

Bob is a lawyer, veteran legal journalist, and award-winning blogger and podcaster. In 2011, he was named to the inaugural Fastcase 50, honoring “the law’s smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries and leaders.” Earlier in his career, he was editor-in-chief of several legal publications, including The National Law Journal, and editorial director of ALM’s Litigation Services Division.