PENNSYLVANIA Law firm's house calls raise bar

A Pennsylvania personal injury law firm tries to best its competitors by making house calls.
LANCASTER, Pa. (AP) -- Carol Jordie was in a halo cast, with her neck and most of the ribs on her right side broken, when she and her husband, Jim, sought lawyer Michael Wagman's help with their June 2000 car accident.
But instead of the Jordies going to Wagman's law office, Wagman visited their Ephrata home, sitting at the dining room table and talking with them over cups of coffee. He visited between eight and 10 times over a two-year period before the case was settled in their favor.
"When you're stressed out to begin with, it's easier to talk and relax when you're in a familiar environment," Carol Jordie said. "Basically, there's nothing more familiar than your own home."
In the struggle to make his firm different from all the others that do personal-injury work in Lancaster, Wagman's firm makes house calls, something normally associated with doctors of days gone by.
'A case of necessity'
"Sometimes, it's a case of necessity," Wagman said from his firm's office in a restored rowhouse in this city about 60 miles west of Philadelphia.
"If you have a seriously injured person who can't get out of the house, obviously you go to the house or you're not going to be able to meet with them," he said. "But we just found that doing it as a matter of normal course appealed to people for the service it provides. It's not all that inconvenient to do."
Wagman's three-person law firm, Wagman, Kreider & amp; Wright, took the extra step of advertising the availability of house calls, airing spots on four local television stations from July through October. So far, the response has been "moderate," and Wagman plans to re-air the commercials beginning in the new year, with adjustments in air times to improve the response, he said.
"I'd love to tell you we have so many clients beating down the doors that we have to send them elsewhere, but that's not the case," Wagman said.
Nationally, making house calls is not common among law firms, but not unheard of either, said Arthur Green, a New Hampshire lawyer who works with the law-practice management group of the American Bar Association.
"A lot of firms are doing it a little more," Green said. "They're more apt to go to a client's business or residence. ... But I think it's very rare that firms advertise that."
Marketing tactic
Small, consumer-oriented firms are conducting house calls as a marketing tactic. For larger firms that have business clients, it's part of a philosophy that says it is important to understand the client better by seeing firsthand how the company is run, he added.
Lawyers for other Lancaster firms said they will perform house calls if a client asks but do not advertise the service.
"I thought the concept of house-call lawyers was fairly intriguing as a method of general practice," said Ron Pollock of the Barley Snyder firm, which represents mostly business clients.
The house-call lawyers concept sprang from the saturated advertising market for lawyers that resulted when a 1977 Supreme Court decision first allowed lawyers to advertise and firms initially flocked to the Yellow Pages to get the word out.
"In that respect, it's like any other business that has to advertise," said Wagman.