New York Lawyer Uses Online Video to Attract New Clients

By Gerry Oginski, a medical malpractice and personal injury trial lawyer in Great Neck, NY. He has created, produced and put more than 100 educational videos online about his practice. His website www.oginski-law.com  consistently comes up #1 in the organic search results in a Google search for "New York Medical Malpractice Lawyer.”  He can be reached at  516-487-8207   and lawmed10@yahoo.com.

 “Welcome, and thank you for joining me. My name is Gerry Oginski, and I’m a medical malpractice & personal injury trial lawyer practicing law here in the State of New York.” This is my introduction in every one of my 100 online videos.   They have produced:

• Dozens of clients per year in my practice area.
• A tremendous number of calls and emails every day from potential clients across the country.
• More than 50,000 views (that’s not a misprint) and counting.
• One video alone has been watched over 8,000 times. The title? “Questions Never to Ask at a Deposition.”

In one year alone I have created over 100 free informational videos about how medical malpractice and personal injury cases work in New York. Importantly, I’ve done it all myself. No big website company, no video guy, no tech guy. Just me: a solo practitioner from New York.

Potential clients have come into my office telling me that my videos were so informative they spent days watching every one of them. By the time these people arrive in my office:

• They know what questions to ask.
• They know what I need to know in order to prove a medical malpractice case
• They’ve learned how a malpractice case in New York works.
• Importantly, they already trust me because they’ve gotten to know me through my informational videos.

Generating half the calls to his office

These informational videos together with my informative website have caused my phone to ring. They create inquiries by email. Currently, I average about three to eight inquiries a day. Having said that, I can tell you that 99% of the inquiries are not meritorious and I do not even invite these people in for an interview. Lawyers who handle medical malpractice cases in New York, and in other states as well, know that there is a very high threshold before you invite a potential client into the office. As a result only 1-2 % of the calls will turn out to be valid cases. In this last year alone, I have noticed that inquiries from my videos and website now comprise more than 50% of all calls to my office. That’s a tremendous increase from 2007. Now, I don’t want you to think that just by putting up a few videos online you are going to see similar results, because you won’t. You must combine your other marketing efforts including your website with your total marketing strategy, and over time, I guarantee that you will see results.

Video is the key to generating leads.

Most attorneys have failed to understand the true value of video and how it can improve their chances of a potential client calling them over their competitor. Legal marketing experts agree that the sooner you start to see the value of video marketing, the sooner you’ll see the results. Larry Bodine recently commented that putting video on your website is “...a great opportunity to present how you look, how you talk, what you're like, and make yourself more attractive to clients. It's a great business-getting technique.” Video is the key to encourage a website visitor to call you. Static websites and fancy graphics just do not cut it anymore, and fail to distinguish yourself from your competitor.

Are you interested in creating, producing and posting videos yourself? This topic alone would take a full day to discuss and explain fully. Here are the highlights:

• The easiest and most costly way is to hire a website company to do it all for you.
• The best way, in my opinion, is to learn to do it yourself. It will definitely require a substantial investment of time to learn all about pre-production, shooting the video and post-production.
• You will need to make an initial investment in equipment, which at the very basic level, includes the following obvious items: A camcorder, professional lights and a good quality microphone.

Pre-production for the beginner

Before ever taking out your video camera, sit down and think of five questions that most of your clients ask every time they come into your office.  Knowing this, you can easily develop the answers in your mind. This will form the outline for what you will talk about in each video clip.

Create only an outline for what you intend to put into your video – but do not write a script. If you’re a trial lawyer, you know juries don’t like when lawyers read from a prepared notes. When a potential client comes into your office with questions, you don’t stop them mid-sentence and refer to a script in your desk to give them an answer. Why? Because you already know the answer. When someone asks you “What’s a deposition?” “What is foreclosure?” “What is a restrictive covenant?” You know the answer.

Shooting the video

Set up your lighting, your sound and your video camera. The first few times you will need to adjust each repeatedly before you get it just right. Importantly, your video camera should have a “white balance” button. It is extremely important to learn how to set this correctly. This button tells the camera what is white. It then adjusts the contrast and colors of everything else accordingly. If you don’t set this properly, your videos will be dark and off-color.

You will need to practice repeatedly in order to make it appear natural. That explains the many different ‘takes’ that you see in the movies. Plan to tape for an hour. With an hour of video you will get about four or five usable video clips.

Post-production for the beginner in seven easy steps

How do I get the video from the camcorder into the computer? I connect a Firewire cable from my video camera to the back of my Apple Mac computer. It’s not a USB port. It’s more squarish and needs a special cable (about $10-25 dollars at Radio Shack). I then open a video editing program called ‘Imovie’ on my Mac. It’s perfect for creating my videos. Unless you’re a pro and do this for a living, you don’t need a video editing program with lots of bells and whistles.

1. The video software recognizes the Firewire cable and I simply press ‘play’ and it imports the entire one hour of video onto my computer. (Doing this takes up a ton of hard drive space, so make sure you have a many gigabytes of storage space and a large external hard drive to store all your videos.)
2. Once the video is in Imovie I now have to edit each clip. This is time-consuming. You really need to learn how to use your video editing software well in order to get a good looking video. Lots of practice and late-night trial and error works well, especially if you’ve been in court all day and have finally put your kids to sleep. Within Imovie you have the ability to add titles, subtitles and background music. Practice tip: Keep any music to a minimum. It will only distract the viewer and should be way in the background. It’s not a music video, and it’s not a chase scene in the movies. It’s a small accent to the information you are providing.
3. Once you have edited out the ‘blips’, the ‘ums’, ‘uhs’, ‘oh shoot, I forgot my train of thought’ comments -- you now have to format it. Imovie has a button that simply says “share.” This transforms your digital video masterpiece into a QuickTime movie. Practice tip: You are given the option of what quality you want to share your video. You should definitely pick “Full Quality” because each step after this one degrades the quality of the video. Again, this will take up a lot of hard drive space.
4. Now what do you do with you QuickTime video on your computer? You now have to convert it to a format that most video sharing sites recognize. One of the most common formats is MP4. There’s a neat little free tool called MPEG Streamclip that you download and install on your computer. You start the program, then open the video you just made from within this little video player that pops up on your screen. It then asks what format you want to convert your movie to. I always convert my video to MP4. Then what?
5. Now I have a total of three different video files on my computer from the same video clip: The original edited video, the QuickTime video and now, the MP4 version of the video. The video that will be uploaded will be the MP4 video. You should know that many video sharing sites convert your video into a different format known as Adobe Flash. The reason is that 98% of all computers have the ability to view videos in Flash format.
6. The next step involves uploading your new video to video sharing sites. I started doing this by uploading each video to each individual video site. This was torture because it is very time consuming. This is also a critical step for search engine optimization. If you fail to provide key information here, you lose an important opportunity for search engines to recognize your new video. Now I use a few different programs that allow me to upload one video to multiple video sites at once -- a great time-saver.

Your efforts do not stop there. Once you have uploaded the video to a video sharing site, you now need to tell your contacts, colleagues, friends, family and the world that you have a video that they should watch.

Ah...now your “moment of Zen,” to quote John Stewart of the Daily Show. Not really, because once you’ve finished this video clip, its back to the drawing board to edit your second video...and the cycle continues. Don’t forget that after you’ve posted your video online, you need to monitor your statistics to see how the video is doing. You will learn a lot from following your stats.

Practice tips

• Never, ever use a webcam to post a video online that you will use to convince a potential client to come to you. If you use a webcam, you guarantee the visitor will call someone else.
• The camcorder need not be expensive, but it should have the ability to attach an external microphone, such as a wireless lavaliere (clip-on) microphone.
• Never use the built-in microphone on your camcorder, as it will pick up all ambient sound and will sound awful.
• Suggestion: Buy a good quality, used camcorder. I did, and saved a bundle. I use the Sony VXR 2100. I bought a new, professional set of lights, on eBay at a cost of $700. I then went to Radio Shack and bought a $50 wireless lavaliere microphone to attach to my camcorder. Learning how to use the equipment, set it up and take it down has a sharp learning curve. However, once you get the hang of it, you will learn to set up the equipment in 15 minutes and take it down in 10.
• For a really nifty trick, take a look at my video blog -- http://medicalmalpracticetutorial.blogspot.com -- and then look to the right hand column and click on any of the videos. My blog allows me to identify which videos I want to have in the column simply by copying and pasting the code that the video sharing site generates.

Till next time, enjoy those videos!