Len Jacoby and Steve Meyers set off a small revolution in legal circles by using mass marketing techniques to sell their services to the man in the street.
Len Jacoby doesn't look much like an attorney this morning: He's wearing jeans, a shirt open at the collar, and Top-Siders, and he's peering through the eyepiece of an Arriflex movie camera.
The rear room of the headquarters of Jacoby & Meyers Law Offices -- a huge two-story space lined with bookshelves that hold legal forms -- has been transformed into a small movie studio. Grips are adjusting lights, a dozen extras dressed as moving men mill about, and a woman in a lavender jumpsuit clicks off photos with a Nikon.
Jacoby relinquishes the camera to the director, who assembles his actors on the set, a massive desk in front of a paneled wall hung with elaborate paintings and law-school diplomas. An actor playing a lawyer sits down at the desk, but when the director gives the cue, the moving men descend on the set, remove the diplomas, and haul away the desk, the paneled wall, everything.
The woman in the jumpsuit reads what will become the voice-over for a TV commercial: "If you take an experienced, knowledgeable lawyer and take away his expensive office and fancy trimmings" -- the posh office is replaced by a small desk, a functional bookcase, and a plant -- "what have you got left? An experienced, knowledgeable lawyer."
A moving man hangs the diplomas on the new wall, which has a "Jacoby & Meyers" sign on it. Len Jacoby smiles and confides, "Making commercials is a lot more fun than practicing law."
This unlikely combination of law and show business has helped make Jacoby & Meyers the largest legal clinic in the country, with 75 offices in California and New York, and annual revenues in excess of $14 million. It also helped earn the firm a spot on INC.'s list of 100 of the nation's fastest-growing closely held companies ("The INC. Private 100," December 1981). With a compound annual growth rate of 133%, the firm ranked number 23.
Len Jacoby and Steve Meyers discovered that, even now, it is possible for a small business to reinvent the wheel -- they redesigned the practice of law. And, once they had the new product in hand, they merchandised it with flair, something the old established law firms said was not only impossible, but also unprofessional.
The men who brought about a minor revolution in the practice of law graduated from UCLA law school in 1967. Jacoby went to work for a medium-sized general practice firm and eventually became a house counsel for Purex Industries Inc.
Meyers joined a legal services program for farm workers, and later became a partner in an entertainment law firm in Los Angeles.
When their paths crossed again in 1972, both Jacoby and Meyers were ready for a change. Meyers and a friend, Forrest S. Mosten, then a law student at UCLA, had been talking about the fact that legal services weren't reaching everyone who needed them: "If you're rich, you can afford a good lawyer, and if you're poor, there's free legal aid," Meyers points out, "but if you're in the middle you're stuck." Mosten recalls, "I had visited an orthodontic clinic and had been impressed by its appearance and the service, so I told Steve: 'It would be great if we could do something like that with the legal profession -- if people could walk in and get qualified advice and then, if they wanted service, get it at a fair price."
Meyers contacted his old friend Jacoby who, he knew, was also interested in finding a wider market for legal services. The three sat down to plan a way to capture that market. "Our idea," says Meyers, "was to set up a new type of law practice, one that would handle the complaints of typical consumers, economically, within the free enterprise system."
An American Bar Association study released in 1977 concluded that people consult lawyers for less than a third of all the problems they have that might require legal assistance. The average middle-class American, the study found, sees an attorney only two or three times during his or her lifetime. Jacoby, Meyers, and Mosten already knew what the study was to confirm: that there was a vast and virtually untapped market. But there were also sound financial reasons why no one else had gone after the uncounseled massess. The types of cases such potential clients have -- divorces, wills, personal injury, bankruptcy, real estate transactions -- are low-ticket items; an attorney couldn't survive on them alone. A mass merchandiser of legal services would have to lower prices, increase volume, and make sure that the public knew about him. And since, at that time, advertising your services as a lawyer was prohibited, getting your name before a mass market was virtually impossible.
Jacoby, Meyers, and Mosten were ready to try anyway. "We sat down and decided what types of cases we could handle efficiently," Jacoby says. "Then, for each type of case we developed a system for handling it from beginning to end." When they were through designing the systems to track cases and drawing up the forms -- opening letters, second letters, interview forms, standard interrogatories, form pleadings, and so on -- to make them work, they had notebooks containing hundreds of forms that could shepherd cases from A to Z. The lawyer could fill in the blanks on the standardized forms, check off appropriate boxes, and turn them over to a secretary who, following other standardized procedures, would draft letters, wills, contracts, and agreements. Delegating virtually all the paperwork to nonlegal personnel freed the attorney to deal with clients. The standardized forms also reduced the likelihood of errors.
It took four months to develop the systems for handling cases. Meanwhile, they had to come up with ways to make their services attractive and accessible. "People are really afraid of lawyers," Meyers says. "The ordinary working person doesn't have much experience with them, and going up to an expensive high rise can be intimidating. We wanted to demystify the law, so we put our offices in storefronts and started taking credit cards." A person coming into the clinic for the first time would pay a $15 consultation fee (it's now $25), and discuss his problem with an attorney for as long as he liked. If the attorney decided further action was necessary, the client would be given a written estimate of the fee. Fees would be substantially lower than those of conventional firms; Jacoby & Meyers's charge for a simple uncontested divorce, for example, is now $195 in California, as opposed to at least $500 at a traditional law firm.
As for advertising, that was still a problem. But before they opened their first Jacoby & Meyers office in Van Nuys, Calif., they made sure that it was going to be something different, and that the press knew about it. So on September 13, 1972, The Legal Clinic of Jacoby & Meyers, the first legal clinic in the country, opened for business. (Mosten's name wasn't included on the shingle because he hadn't yet been admitted to the bar.)
The press showed up, and Jacoby & Meyers was off to a running start. "We were the beneficiaries of a lot of free advertising," says Meyers, "and, in retrospect, I don't think we could have survived without it." But even "free" advertising drew the ire of the local bar, and two weeks later Jacoby and Meyers received a letter informing them that the firm was under investigation. Eventually, the State Bar of California initiated disciplinary proceedings against them, charging, among other things, that they had violated the ban on advertising by speaking to the press.
Jacoby & Meyers fought the charges for more than four years -- and got considerable coverage in the press as a result."The California Bar's overreaction provided us with publicity that we couldn't have bought at the time," says Mosten. Finally, in May 1977, the California Supreme Court dismissed the charges. Then, a month and a half later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Bates v. State Bar of Arizona, that attorneys had a constitutional right to advertise.
