Fun with Lawyers

[Somebody]

So here's an interesting question.

If 10,000 people on, say, April 15th did a Yahoo search on the word
Mesothelioma then clicked on the top sponsored lawyer link, would said
ambulance chaser have to fork half a million dollars over to Yahoo?

Even more efficient - how hard would it be for some clever coder to
write a few Perl scripts to do this?

Just thinking out loud.

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Lawyers Bid Up Value Of Web-Search Ads

By CARL BIALIK
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE
April 8, 2004; Page B1

"Mesothelioma" may be the most valuable word on the Internet.

The rare, asbestos-related cancer is the king of search advertising, a
Web phenomenon in which companies bid to get their ads placed high on
the search-result pages of sites like Yahoo and Google and then pay when
users click on them. While many search ads cost less than a dollar a
click, personal-injury law firms looking to land new clients have bid up
mesothelioma ads to $90 or more.

"It can get to be a bidding war," says Tracy Helser, Web manager for
Kazan, McClain, Abrams, Fernandez, Lyons & Farrise, an Oakland, Calif.,
firm specializing in asbestos cases that advertises on search engines.

Paid searches have become a cash cow for search engines and their
partners by creating a flexible market for business "leads," which allow
an advertiser to reach a new customer. Though it can change daily, the
amount advertisers will pay for such leads ranges from as much as $100
for mesothelioma information to $20 for conference-call services and 31
cents for paper clips.

Mainly because of a surge in search advertising and its acquisition of
search company Overture, Yahoo Inc. took in $635.5 million in
advertising-related revenue in the latest quarter, more than triple its
year-earlier result. (See related article.) Google Inc. doesn't release
financial data publicly, but most of its revenue comes from search
advertising.

With mesothelioma, it's simple economics, says Chris Hahn, executive
director of the not-for-profit Mesothelioma Applied Research Foundation
in Santa Barbara, Calif. "Why is [mesothelioma] the highest paying
keyword? Because there is nothing more valuable than one mesothelioma
patient."

Lawyers are so eager to attract mesothelioma cases because there is a
clear link between it and asbestos exposure. Lawyers say a typical award
in a mesothelioma settlement is $1 million, and attorneys get 40%. For
cases that go to trial, the mean award in 2001 was $6 million, triple
the amount two years earlier, according to a study by think tank Rand
Corp. Over roughly two decades of asbestos litigation through 2002, Rand
says, mesothelioma cases represented about 4% of asbestos-related cases
but 20% of all cash paid out in asbestos-related claims.

>From an attorney's point of view, mesothelioma cases, when pursued
individually, "are the most valuable cases in the system," says Deborah
Hensler, professor of law at Stanford and co-author of several Rand
studies on asbestos litigation.

MOUSE MONEY

Advertisers bid more for top placements when a Web user searches for key
words that carry big paybacks.

Key word                Top per-click bid*
Mesothelioma attorney  $70.24
Car accident lawyer     50
Investment fraud        30
Wisconsin mortgage      19
Conference calling      18.22
Casino                  14.97

 "You can overspend" for mesothelioma search ads, admits Philip Harley,
a partner with Paul, Hanley & Harley LLP in Berkeley, Calif., which
advertises online and gets about 20% to 25% of its mesothelioma clients
from the Web. But, he adds, "if you spend carefully, you get a very nice
return. It's a good way to build a client base."

For people diagnosed with mesothelioma, the cancer's course is swift.
Attacking the protective lining around the lungs, abdominal organs or
heart, mesothelioma initially brings on chest pain, coughing and
shortness of breath. There are treatments that can extend life, but many
patients have less than a year to live once they are diagnosed. The
cancer generally surfaces 30 years or more after exposure, and the
number of annual diagnoses has been steady over the past decade, at
roughly 3,000 cases. Settlements are frequently paid out of bankruptcy
trusts established after asbestos manufacturers restructured under
Chapter 11, but some healthy companies also face liability. (Far less is
spent each year on mesothelioma research than on lawsuits. See related
article.)

For victims of the rare cancer, the Internet has become a main source of
treatment information. Robert Taub, director of the Mesothelioma Center
at Columbia University in New York, says that the patients he sees go on
the Web within three or four days of diagnosis.

David Sugarbaker, professor of surgery at Harvard's medical school in
Cambridge, Mass., and chief of thoracic surgery at Brigham Women's
Hospital, says that many of his patients watch a Webcast of his radical
surgery (at www.chestsurg.org) before they have it. Robin Coffey,
speaking just after her husband Mark, age 46, had the surgery
successfully in February, said he insisted on watching the graphic video
beforehand because "he felt more confident that [the doctor] was smart."

Ms. Coffey, of Grand Island, N.Y., says her husband was resigned to die
within a year before he found Dr. Sugarbaker online. "To go from having
just a year to possibly having much more time is unbelievable," she
says. The couple hasn't yet looked into litigation, she says.

These Web searches by patients provide fertile advertising ground for
lawyers. Paid-search ads typically run at the top or the side of main
search results, so if people search for mesothelioma, they get nonpaid
results framed by the ads. (In addition to paid-search ads on their own
sites, Yahoo and Google provide such ads to third-party companies such
as Time Warner Inc.'s America Online, Ask Jeeves Inc. and Microsoft
Corp.'s MSN in revenue-sharing deals.) When viewers click on the ads,
they are sent to lawyer sites with a mixture of information, links to
other cancer sites -- and a phone number, online form or e-mail address
to contact an attorney.

While still a fraction of overall legal-services advertising, online
spending rose more than fivefold to $8.7 million between January and
November last year, compared with just $1.5 million a year earlier,
according to market-researcher TNS Media Intelligence/CMR. Overall,
legal-services ad spending was $434.8 million in the recent period.

Lawyer Jonathan David, who says he tries many mesothelioma cases out of
his law offices near Houston, was recently bidding about $92 a click on
Yahoo's Overture ad system to direct those searching for "mesothelioma
lawyer" to his ad offering legal services. Meanwhile, Paul Danziger, a
Houston attorney, was bidding $45 per click on Overture for his ad,
keyed off the search term "mesothelioma."

James Sokolove, a lawyer and marketer for partner law firms in Newton,
Mass., also spends "significantly" online. He says that in most
instances, the client-acquisition cost is about 50% less for paid
searching than for TV. This is true even for mesothelioma ads, he says,
because their targeted nature makes up for the high price. (Besides
mesothelioma, Mr. Sokolove also advertises for clients in drug-recall
and stockbroker-malfeasance cases.)

Some search-engine watchers are skeptical of the high costs of
mesothelioma ads. Fredrick Marckini, chief executive of search-marketing
firm iProspect in Watertown, Mass., says he doubts that bids as high as
$50 are worthwhile. "The vast majority of people who are engaged in
online marketing are not measuring their outcome and return," he says.

Yahoo and Google decline to say what portion of their overall
advertising revenue comes from high-value keywords like "mesothelioma."
A Yahoo spokeswoman says, "Overture has millions of keyword marketplaces
and more than 100,000 advertisers, so we are not reliant on any one
keyword marketplace."

The bidding systems on Yahoo and Overture are similar, but each has its
wrinkles. Overture advertisers pay a penny more than the next-lowest
bid, per click, and bidding is done publicly online. Under Google's
system, bids are available only to advertisers, and Google bidding is
capped at $50 a click. Google also takes into account other factors,
such as popularity, when determining the order of ads on a search-result
page.

The high price of mesothelioma ads has had some unintended consequences
as firms try other means to land mesothelioma patients. In particular,
some firms are attempting to boost their Web sites' spot on search
engines' so-called algorithmic, or nonpaid, listings by tweaking the
content and links to get a higher ranking. These efforts can include
using the desired keywords (like "mesothelioma") frequently near the top
of their home page, and including them in the Web address.

Due to these efforts, eight of the top 10 nonpaid listings in a recent
Google search of "mesothelioma" were for sites sponsored by law firms,
pushing down nonlawyer sites such as the National Cancer Institute. By
comparison, a search for "cancer" -- a tamer ad category -- produces the
American Cancer Society as the top nonpaid result.

Lawyers say that they are providing valuable medical and legal
information on the rare cancer for free.

One recent entrant to asbestos law, Childress & Charpentier in
Melbourne, Fla., took unusual steps to climb the free search rankings.
The firm snapped up expired Web addresses -- including bmwexperience.com
and biotechnology-investor.com -- and populated them with words related
to mesothelioma. These sites then redirected to the firm's home page,
mesothelioma-and-asbestos.com. The firm tried paid search ads, but found
them to be too pricey -- as much as $7,000 to $8,000 per month,
according to Carl Peterson, an associate with the firm.

--- end forwarded text


-- 
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
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experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'