On the Record

By: Caryn Tamber

You must check out this video.

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Here’s the story: Micah Buchdahl is a legal marketer in New Jersey. He was approached by a mid-size law firm in a top five market to work on a marketing campaign for lateral recruitment. (He won’t say which firm; the reason for that will become very clear in just a moment.) The firm wanted “edgy,” they said.

Buchdahl figured he’d create a mini-movie and try to get it to go viral on the Internet, generating some real buzz for the firm. He wrote a script for three installments and had the first one produced by some friends in California. It’s pretty polished and pretty funny. It shows a young megafirm partner trying to talk to a comically arrogant managing partner about his future. (Memorable exchange: “Gary, what can I do for you?” “I’m Steve. Steve Johnson.” “Of course you are.” And: “We think the world of you. There’s not a better IP attorney in the city.” “I’m a real estate lawyer.” And also: “We want you here as long as it makes sense.” “What does that mean?” “It means you’re here until you’re not.”)Watch to the end for a bleeped expletive, which Buchdahl sort of wavered about including. “Obviously, it’s designed to make you flinch a little bit,” he told me yesterday.

When he screened the ad for the firm’s management committee, they were “horrified,” Buchdahl said.

“Using the word ‘hate’ wouldn’t do the word ‘hate’ justice,” he said.

It wasn’t even the expletive that got them, he said. No one cracked a smile during the whole four-minute video.

He had told the firm before showing them the video that if they didn’t like it, they didn’t have to pay for it. He figured the couple of thousand it cost him to make would be an investment; maybe he could find a firm that was interested in using it. But the firm actually offered to pay for it so they could destroy it. They told him they liked the concept but wanted something a little more “traditional,” which he took to mean your standard recruiting video. He said he thinks the real reason they wanted the video was because they were afraid of being proven wrong if another firm bought it and found success with it.

“That’s when I said, I’m still going to put it out there but I’m going to release it as my own marketing tool, just put it out there,” Buchdahl said. He said it would be great if a firm wanted to buy it and even better if they wanted him to make the other two installments, but he is at least hoping a lot of people watch it.

So he hired a viral video expert to get the ad out, and they posted it Monday to a bunch of Internet video sites. He also sent it to some friends, including one of my editors here, who passed it on to me.

What do you think of Buchdahl’s skewering of big law firms? If you’d been on the managing committee of the firm that hired him, would you have shown him the door or taken the chance on this ad?