Author: Damon Chetson (page 3 of 4)

Raleigh Criminal Lawyer

February 10, 2010

The kind of awe and admiration Greg has for Apple, I have for Google. Whereas Apple’s product launches are greeted with unending speculation, leaks, rumor-mongering and fanfare, Google quietly rolls out new features.

Some are great – Google Voice has turned out to be surprisingly useful in my business. Others are not – I still haven’t figured out what Google Wave is good for.

Yesterday Google rolled out a new product, Google Buzz.

Unlike the iPad, Buzz is not a category killer. But it takes an existing category – the Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn world of social electronic interaction – and makes it… better.

I love the idea of social networking. I hate some of its implementations. For instance, Facebook is a terrible service – slow, buggy, non-intuitive.

Twitter is fast and a neat idea, but obviously limited in its implementation.

I rarely use LinkedIn.

But Google Buzz is potentially a useful collaborative tool that I can use across a range of relationships – from close friends, to family, to distant friends, to network contacts, to potential clients.

It integrates into gmail, which allows me to use it in the same way I use email. It will connect with other legacy social network sites, such as twitter. And it will allow me to do social networking with a much richer range of tools – text, graphics, photos, and video.

February 9, 2010

Some random thoughts on a Tuesday

by Damon Chetson

Raleigh Criminal Lawyer

Three months into my law practice, I’ve broken all my targets, and revised targets, by a mile. In addition to doubling what I predicted I’d book between October and December 31, 2009, I’ve been relentless about moving up the Google rankings.

Basically, I’ve done this by first winning the search rankings in less competitive, but still prized and wealthy suburbs of Raleigh – if you search for DWI, criminal lawyer, or assorted offenses in Apex or Cary – I come up in the top ten in most search.

I’m now making my way into the top 10 for search terms like Raleigh criminal lawyer and criminal lawyer Raleigh and variations on that theme.

Here’s some specific advice. First, if you can get into Google local’s top 7 for your community, do it. And once there, don’t mess with your Google local account. Don’t tweak your listing to add new search terms. Google will penalize you for it. I played around with my Google listing, and was sanctioned for it in late November. My listing did not return to the top 7 for two months. I suspect that cost me $15,000 in lost business.

Second, think about specific terms you want to dominate. As I mentioned in my previous post on the subject, people are not searching for a general realtor or a general lawyer. They’re searching for a criminal lawyer or drug lawyer or whatever. In the case of realtors, you need to think of your niche. But it’s easier to dominate the niche.

Third, if colleagues – aka competitors – start asking you how you’re getting in this business, be generous. I’ve had two tentative requests for help. I’m generous with my advice, knowing that telling someone how to do something, and having them turn around and do it, are two different things. They’ll appreciate the advice, even if they don’t or can’t implement it.

And if they do implement it, you’ll probably do better than them, seeing as you have the basic quality of an entrepreneur. And if Read more

January 4, 2010

Bright spots…

by Damon Chetson

Raleigh Criminal Lawyer

For all the doom and gloom about the economy etc., it’s important to remember that the productive talents of human beings can create better lives for all of us.

Technology is one sector of the economy that, broadly speaking, has witnessed tremendous innovation over the past 30 years. Nearly the whole panoply of consumer electronics – cell phones, smartphones, computers, digital recorders, the Intertubes, digital cameras – did not exist in 1980, or existed in such a rudimentary form (I remember playing on my Uncle’s 48k – or was it 16k? – Apple II+) that they were novelties.

In fact, real wages have stagnated or declined since 1970, such that any improvements in the day-to-day American life are attributable through the human inventive power. Some people make better stuff for the rest of us to consume and enjoy, and, of course, to use in our work.

Pretty cool.

Now, this might just be a bunch of marketing puffery, but this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas may be the best ever:

“In my 28 years of attending the CES and participating in it and being a part of it and running it for most of that time, I can honestly say there will be more innovation at this show than any one in history,” Gary Shapiro [president and CEO of the CEA] said.

If you’re like me, this will set your heart aflutter: “rumors are flying that Apple will unveil a touch-screen tablet computer January 26.”

January 2, 2010

New York Times on the Loan Modification Program

by Damon Chetson

Raleigh Criminal Lawyer

The New York Times is reporting what everyone at Bloodhound Blog has known for a long time about the Federal Government’s attempt to encourage loan modifications:

The Obama administration’s $75 billion program to protect homeowners from foreclosure has been widely pronounced a disappointment, and some economists and real estate experts now contend it has done more harm than good.

If you’re a fan of Peter Schiff, then you heard him say in the fall of 2008 that the government’s cure to a bursting asset bubble would be worse than the underlying problem itself. He was right, but the logic of politics does not care about the long term economic health of the country.

Here’s The New York Times telling us that government-backed loan modifications are:

1. delaying a wrenching yet cleansing process through which borrowers give up unaffordable homes and banks fully reckon with their disastrous bets on real estate,

2. [encouraging] desperate homeowners [to send] payments to banks in often-futile efforts to keep their homes, which some see as wasting dollars they could have saved in preparation for moving to cheaper rental residences,

3. [are allowing banks to use] temporary loan modifications under the Obama plan as justification to avoid an honest accounting of the mortgage losses still on their books,

4. [are preventing] housing prices [from] drop[ping] to levels at which enough Americans can afford to buy,

5. delaying the return to work for carpenters, construction workers, and a whole sector of the American economy.

These numbers tell the story:

In 2008, more than 1.7 million homes were “lost” through foreclosures, short sales or deeds in lieu of foreclosure, according to Moody’s Economy.com. Last year, more than two million homes were lost, and Economy.com expects that this year’s number will swell to 2.4 million.

Now, if in late 2008, the government had simply let foreclosures go forward without holding out hope for a loan modification program, it would’ve been an awful as opposed to merely bad 2009. But we would be seeing a recovery in the next 6 months. Instead, we’re just going to see more foreclosures for the next two years.

Update: The Washington Independent has a good Read more

December 29, 2009

Don’t Mess with The Google

by Damon Chetson

Raleigh Criminal Lawyer

So back in October I launched a Google Local account for The Chetson Firm. This is an account that links your business to Google Maps and allows you to post information such as your hours, location, parking, etc. I posted some images, a link to a video I had created, etc.

I shot to the top of Google local rankings for keywords in Raleigh. I’m certain that was responsible for multiple thousands in business. Life was good. I tweaked the listing a few more times, it kept performing well.

Then at the end of November, I tweaked it again, this time stuffing a few more keywords into the listing. Google “flagged” the listing. Overnight it disappeared from the local search results displayed by Google maps. This was a disaster. I had difficulty undoing my mistake. Where I was in the top 7 for two months, now I was nowhere to be found. (I still perform well on Google’s organic search words, so business didn’t dry up completely. In fact, December was a strong month.)

Since Google Local has no easy way to report problems, I went into Google’s local business forums, where I found lots of people in similar circumstances. Their ads were displaying fine, until the end of November when Google did something that affected them.

Fortunately on the strength of other marketing – some direct mail I do to DWI defendants and the fact that my organic google results are strong – I’ve continued to pull in business, but I would guess I’ve lost about $10,000 in business because of this mistake.

I’m on the way to repairing the damage, and Google is expected to refresh its results after the New Year’s. But this illustrated for me two aspects of the same phenomenon in marketing and the online world.

1. Don’t put all your marketing in one basket.

2. Google really is a market maker in many respects for many different kinds of businesses.

I’m now looking for other ways to “diversify” my marketing. Fortunately there’s Bing and other emerging avenues. Unfortunately Google, as much as I generally like their products (Wave being an exception), is still Read more

December 12, 2009

Into the belly of the beast…

by Damon Chetson

Raleigh Criminal Lawyer

So I’ve been building a criminal practice… I’ve now reached the point that I’m bringing in enough clients to make that self-sustaining in terms of paying the bills and generating some income. Criminal practice is fun, but limited in terms of compensation.

My intention has always been to add at least one, maybe two areas of practice onto that. I’ve been considering some kind of debt/bankruptcy law or equine law (or both). Of course, I don’t want to spread myself too thin. There’s a lot to learn in each area. Equine law is uncharted. There are a few practitioners, but none doing it the way I’d like it to be done. I’d need to invent a whole business model myself, test it, then innovate. In addition to that, I’d need to get acquainted with areas of the law for which there are few, if any, mentors. There’d be a lot of self-learning.

Debt/bankruptcy law is pretty well charted, although I have my own innovations I’d like to introduce, particularly on the business and marketing end. The good thing is that while I’d be able to innovate in certain respects, I wouldn’t have to develop a business model out of whole cloth. And there are tried and true litigation methods, and “Continuing Legal Education” classes that teach you those methods.

So I’m in a bit of a quandry. I’m leaning toward the debt/bankruptcy practice because it is proven and because I can anticipate returns in the first half of 2010. These returns are not insignificant. Equine law may be a time and money suck for a while before either failing or being a huge winner. The upside on equine law could be huge, much bigger than bankruptcy/debt law.

Here’s one additional consideration: If you’re a pessimist about this economy, you should expect bankruptcy and debt law to be a thriving area for years and years to come.

Any thoughts?

November 29, 2009

Where’s that inflation?

by Damon Chetson

Raleigh Criminal Lawyer

I’ve been saying for a year now that inflation is down the road. I had predicted that we’d start seeing the first signs of it by the end of 2009. And I had said, in anticipation of inflation, the Fed would start raising interest rates, in order to draw out all the money it and the rest of what the federal government has pumped into the economy since the fall of 2008.

But… there’s no apparent inflation yet. The CPI – however accurate that is – has increased at between .2 and .4 percent in July, August, and September.

As a result, the Fed has contented itself with keeping interest rates low. But this can’t last forever can it?

Where’s the inflation? Someone smarter than I please chime in.

November 25, 2009

Weblogging Clients

by Damon Chetson

Raleigh Criminal Lawyer

I’m now writing on a few blogs. BloodHoundBlog, of course. But also my own firm blogs for criminal law and bankruptcy law.

All this blogging can get a guy down, especially when you have to use WordPress’s web interface. I like the act of writing. I hate the act of logging into WordPress and blogging.

So I’ve been looking for webblogging clients – tools you can use to interface with the blog, draft posts from your desktop, and post them without having to log into the actual WordPress site.

I’ve been using ScribeFire for a few months, and it’s ok. It is a plugin that works with Firefox, whether on a Mac or a PC. The problem is that, so far as I know, the plugin hasn’t been re-written for Google Chrome. And I like Google Chrome because it is so fast.

I recently did a little googling, and found some other clients. The best of the batch, which I’ve been using today, is called Ecto. Ecto is only available on a Mac. It’s light-weight, easy to use, has the ability to “cross-post” to different blogs, and also interacts well with WordPress’s various features, like scheduled posts, tags, and categories.

It’s a little buggy. It’s crashed once on me today. I’m hoping that is fixed, because otherwise I like it.

This post was written with Ecto, in fact.

November 22, 2009

Dominating Websearch with Focus

by Damon Chetson

Raleigh Criminal Lawyer

One of the things I picked up from reading Greg’s blog was his desire to dominate the real estate market not in Phoenix, but in particular neighborhoods. Chris Gilgian’s, a 1950s development where I used to live, the Willo Historic District, and other neighborhoods in downtown Phoenix.

As a criminal lawyer, it’s a bit different because, at least in North Carolina, the court system is countywide, meaning that anyone arrested for a crime in Wake County will be handled at the same courthouse or go to the same jail, regardless of whether they live in Knightdale or in Apex. It doesn’t much matter whether they’re a North Raleigh resident or a Cary resident from a lawyer’s perspective. The case will be handled at the same place.

But for search and ranking purposes, it does matter. That’s because most people I want as clients have never committed a crime before or have only had traffic or minor misdemeanors. And because they’re new to the system, they may not realize, when they’re searching for a lawyer, that the system is county wide. As a consequence they will search for a lawyer in their neighborhood.

That insight – that potential clients will search for an Apex criminal lawyer or a Cary criminal lawyer – has focused my web and marketing approach. In the first few weeks, I would mention every neighborhood in the community in my posts. The scattershot approach wasn’t incredibly effective in terms of ranking.

Now I focus my attention on three communities: Cary, Apex, and Raleigh. Why those communities? Raleigh is obvious: if I can dominate Raleigh, there’s a lot of business to be had. But I picked Cary and Apex for four reasons. These are the wealthiest parts of the county, so people can pay for legal representation. These are places where a lot of northerners live – the joke about Cary is that it stands for “Containment Area for Relocated Yankees.” The fact that I also am a northerner is certainly not a negative when interacting with them, and may also be a plus.

In addition, it was clear to me from a Read more

November 19, 2009

Motorola Droid: First Impressions

by Damon Chetson

Raleigh Criminal Lawyer

As I mentioned here earlier this week, I’ve been thinking about switching to a different network. Love the iPhone, but am completely unimpressed with AT&T’s network. So I went into a Verizon store to look at the Droid over the weekend, and then bought one after work at BestBuy on Monday.

I did the transaction at BestBuy because you get the rebate immediately, instead of having to cut off the label from the box and send it in to Verizon if you were to buy the phone at the Verizon store.

The phone itself is quite nice. If I hadn’t been spoiled on the iPhone, it would be the best phone I’ve played with or had. I’ve had a couple of Blackberries, used by wife’s Motorola Q. I haven’t used a recent Palm, so can’t compare it to that.

Verizon has a superior network. The call quality is night and day. The calls are crisp, the 3G network is fast, and phone calls have not been dropped in the past three two plus days. That’s a huge improvement over AT&T, which would’ve dropped at least 2 or 3 of those calls.

As for the phone: On the upside, the physical keyboard (in addition to a virtual keyboard), while not very good, is nice to have. The keyboard is too flat, so it makes finding the right keys hard. There are many free apps, and they’re pretty good quality. If you use Google and Gmail for your email, contacts, and calendar, the integration is seamless. Even Facebook contacts are properly synched. Google Voice works great, and because I’m now on a fast network, the call quality between Google Voice and the regular phone isn’t different.

I got the 16 gig version, but thankfully I can swap out the 16 gig SD card in the future for a 32 gig card if I ever want to expand the memory on the phone. If I bought an iPhone, I’d have to buy a whole new phone to increase the capacity. 32 gig SD cards now run at about $90 to $100, so they’re not cheap, but the Read more

November 15, 2009

Giving up the iPhone for the Droid?

by Damon Chetson

Raleigh Criminal Lawyer

Updates Below 11/16/09

I live in the far suburbs (bordering on rural) of Raleigh, and have had the iPhone 3G (not the latest 3GS) since April. I mostly love it. It integrates well with gmail, where I maintain my contacts. It has a few really nice apps that make life easier. And the design is very nice and intuitive. In fact, I’m in discussions with some folks from Bangalore about building an app for the iPhone that relates to part of my law practice.

But AT&T’s network is terrible. Lately I’ve been dropping two or three calls a day. Back before I started my practice, it was mostly just annoying. Now it’s getting to the point where it’s interfering with business. On Friday, when I was in the midst of a major issue with a client, I dropped at least six calls.

AT&T hooked me up with a new SIM card this weekend, and I went to the Apple store where they exchanged the iPhone with a new one. But I dropped another two calls today.

So I’m thinking about switching to Verizon. The Motorola Droid is out, and I played around with it today at the Verizon store. I’ve gotten so used to the high quality of Apple software, that I was somewhat disappointed by the way the Droid moved from application to application and the fact that the same button did not have the same effect in each application.

So I’m going to stick it out for a week with the iPhone. If I continue to have phone troubles this week, I’m going to switch.

It’s unfortunate, because the iPhone has been great for me. But dropped calls are not acceptable. If you’ve got some thoughts on a Verizon phone – Blackberry, Motorola Droid or Palm – that you love, let me know. The Droid is appealing because of the open framework and the fact that apps are going to be developed for it in great quantities.

And if you know how to write an iPhone App, and are interested in having me pay you to write a simple one for my Read more

November 9, 2009

Google Voice Redux

by Damon Chetson

Raleigh Criminal Lawyer

Back in September I gave a lukewarm review of Google Voice. Since September, it’s been working much better. Much less lag, much better transcription quality. I use it now on my business cards, website, and so forth, and it’s a great tool to help screen calls that come in.

Google Voice is a free, invitation-only service. They recently gave me two invitations that I can give to the first two people who contact me at bhb@chetson.com. I believe you need to use GMail as your webmail provider in order to take full advantage of Google Voice. The two services work together.

October 31, 2009

Business as Politics? No way.

by Damon Chetson

Raleigh Criminal Lawyer

I don’t know where I am on the political spectrum. I don’t think it’s particularly important. But I know that if I took Robert Worthington’s approach to my business, I would be out of a job. People come to me with problems. I try to help them resolve their problems within the set of rules. They pay me. End of story.

What I think about those rules when I lay my head down at night is quite distinct from how I earn a living.

Whether you’re a lawyer or a real estate agent, a lender or a widget maker, you add value to the world by solving other people’s problems: keeping them out of jail, finding them a home, helping them finance a purchase, or selling them some widgets.

How you conduct your business – how you treat people and honor your commitments – matters.

What you think about whether they take a tax credit, or borrowed from 2003-2006 at Fed subsidized mortgage rates, or have benefited for decades from the mortgage interest rate deduction does not matter.

And if you’re so concerned about an $8,000 tax credit that you’d turn away customers, I think, quite frankly, your priorities are confused. There are some deep injustices in the world, and in this country. An $8,000 giveaway, however stupid or smart a policy that may be, is not one of them.

October 21, 2009

Selling is fun! And fundamental too!

by Damon Chetson

Raleigh Criminal Lawyer

For the real estate agents among us, well you guys are used to selling things. I think the act of selling is undervalued in our culture. When you sell something, you are convincing another person that, whether it’s your service or a house, that you have something of value, and that they should part with some of their hard earned cash to pay for it.

There’s something very honorable about the exchange. No one puts a gun to anyone’s head. No one takes by force. One human being is convinced or persuaded that, yes, that home, or that real estate agent’s services are worth the price asked. And a deal happens.

For all of my life, I’ve been a salaried employee. A guy who worked in an office and was paid for his work. And that’s fine too.

But let me tell you, that when I made my first “sale” this week – meaning, a human being hired me as a lawyer to represent him on a matter – there was something particularly exhilarating about it. Of course, it’s going to take a few more clients like this to hire me, but, with my private practice barely three weeks old, and a bunch of leads in the pipeline, it’s pretty nice to make a sale.

So let me say, to all you real estate agents who have been selling homes to live in for all these years, why didn’t you tell me earlier how fun it could be to sell something to someone, and to add value to their lives.

October 14, 2009

Bucking up is not the answer, and even if it were, it isn’t

by Damon Chetson

Raleigh Criminal Lawyer

In my past life, I worked in public policy. This was a pretty much disheartening experience because, whether you’re on the left, right or center, you’ll be disappointed. It’s almost never the case that policymakers (read: politicians) want to make good policy. The policies they do enact are mishmashed compromises sweetened by special interest giveaways. That’s just the logic of politics.

One of the things you frequently hear is that the economy is all psychology. That if people would just be in a better mood, they’d spend more, and then we’d get the Good Ship America righted and back under sail. That’s not so.

More accurately, while there are psychological aspects to economic activity, simply telling people to buck up and get back out there is not a recipe for anything other than talking to yourself in the middle of the night.

You can’t will a country (or a world) out of a recession anymore than government can spend its way out of a recession. There is a psychology to a recession, but there is also a logic to a recession. And that logic is economic.

The problem with the recent bubble is that it was massive and massively inflated. Unlike the tech bubble of 2000-1, this bubble was wide-ranging, affecting not only the real estate market, but the equity markets as well. In addition, because an awful lot of real resources had shifted across the country into building homes and owning homes, this bubble was far wider in scope, affecting many tens of millions more people, than a tech bubble that was regionally isolated and industry specific.

So yes, people are psychologically depressed. But, you know, between 10 and 18 percent of people are unemployed, depending on how the government has cooked the books, so telling them to “buck up” is kind of missing the point. Even if people could “buck up,” we don’t want them to. Recent spending by both individuals and the government has been entirely debt financed. Getting people out there to spend again does them no good.

This bubble Read more

Author: Damon Chetson (page 3 of 4)

Buzzing about Google Buzz

by Damon Chetson

Some random thoughts on a Tuesday

by Damon Chetson

Bright spots…

by Damon Chetson

New York Times on the Loan Modification Program

by Damon Chetson

Don’t Mess with The Google

by Damon Chetson

Into the belly of the beast…

by Damon Chetson

Where’s that inflation?

by Damon Chetson

Weblogging Clients

by Damon Chetson

Dominating Websearch with Focus

by Damon Chetson

Motorola Droid: First Impressions

by Damon Chetson

Giving up the iPhone for the Droid?

by Damon Chetson

Google Voice Redux

by Damon Chetson

Business as Politics? No way.

by Damon Chetson

Selling is fun! And fundamental too!

by Damon Chetson

Bucking up is not the answer, and even if it were, it isn’t

by Damon Chetson

Search BloodhoundBlog

Subscribe to our RSS feeds

Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Back of the house

Media Contacts