Why I Started Atticus Marketing

Conrad Saam | June 13, 2013

When I left Avvo to run Urbanspoon’s marketing in 2011, I thought I was saying goodbye to the legal profession forever.  Instead, I found myself tugged back by attorneys looking for search help who I couldn’t work with while at Avvo.  What started out as occasional free SEO advice grew into moonlighting consulting gigs.  Working with these firms exposed me to the gross overbilling and outdated, ineffective and self-serving tactics employed by (some) legal industry marketing agencies.  I was now experiencing first hand the anecdotes I heard about during my days at Avvo.

Eventually I decided it was time to leave restaurants behind and go full time with Atticus Marketing with the following guiding principles:

• Value – We deliver value NOT hours.  Value = traffic growth.
• Transparency – We deliver good and bad news to our clients.
• Targeted – We only work with clients we can cost effectively help.
• Persistence – We create value that persists should the client choose to disengage.

Over the past year, I refined a process and set of tactics that are cost effective in driving traffic improvements for my moonlighting clients. This experience guided the development of a product called Simple Search to help a very specific subset of the legal market. Simple Search delivers a targeted, quantifiable improvement in website traffic at a regular, predictable cost and is designed for:

• Small to medium, consumer facing firms.
• Moderately competitive markets (by practice area and geography).
• Firms who would rather work with clients than work with Google.

It’s nice to be back.