The Supreme Court Let Lawyers Advertise. Jaffe Taught Them What to Say.

There is a peculiar problem in selling legal expertise: the people best qualified to explain it are trained to qualify everything. Ask a lawyer what makes a practice distinctive and the answer may arrive with three caveats, two defined terms and a footnote. This is responsible lawyering. It is not always memorable marketing.

Jaffe has made a business out of that gap. The Washington-based agency works only in the legal market, translating what lawyers know into stories that a client, reporter, ranking researcher or search engine can recognize. Its customers are law firms large and small, individual lawyers, legal associations and vendors selling into the profession. The tool kit has expanded well beyond public relations: brand strategy, websites, search, content, social media, video, podcasts, rankings submissions, crisis counsel and business-development training all sit under the same roof.

The breadth can obscure the more interesting choice. Jaffe is not a general agency with a legal desk. It is an agency built around the organizational oddities of law firms - partnerships rather than ordinary hierarchies, reputation-sensitive work, ethics rules that vary by state, and experts who must market themselves without sounding as if they are marketing themselves. The niche is the product.

The decision that made a market

In 1977, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Bates v. State Bar of Arizona. The ruling loosened the professional restrictions that had made lawyer advertising largely taboo. Permission, however, did not arrive with instructions. Jay M. Jaffe saw the opening. In 1978 he founded an agency devoted to law firms, at a moment when the category of legal marketing was barely formed.

This timing explains much of Jaffe's durability. The agency did not bolt legal clients onto an existing advertising practice. It grew up alongside the market it serves. In the late 1990s, one Jaffe publicist recalls, a media win could involve a press release, calls to reporters, and a physical clipping assembled with scissors and glue. Today the same objective - recognition - might require a bylined article, a conference proposal, a ranking submission, short video, boosted social post and an internal note that helps partners cross-sell. The destination remained familiar while the roads multiplied.

“If humanity gets left out of the board room, nobody wins.”Terry M. Isner, owner and CEO, branding and marketing

The failure is often hiding in plain sight

Agency claims become more useful when they encounter something broken. In one published case, a Salt Lake City law firm asked Jaffe to audit its website after first hiring the company for PR. The first thing to fail was not the firm's legal thinking. It was the machinery around it. A traditional advertising contractor had built off-topic backlinks and published weak material, just as search engines were preparing to punish those tactics. Much of the firm's useful content sat in PDFs that search engines could not properly treat as fresh, indexable pages.

The audit changed the client's mind about what the problem was. More content and more links were not the answer. Jaffe removed risky tactics, converted material into crawlable formats, analyzed local keywords and optimized the site architecture. Traffic rose 35%. Across the next six months, organic traffic averaged 30% above the comparable period a year earlier. No public project price was disclosed, which is typical of Jaffe's custom work. The measurable cost was the firm's earlier habit of paying for activity that produced the wrong visitors and exposed the domain to penalties.

A second firm had built its main website on one system and its blog on another domain. Search engines were not indexing the blog, and readers who somehow found it could not easily reach the firm. Jaffe moved the site to an open-source system, pulled the blog into the main domain, fixed indexing, performed keyword work and promoted posts through social media. Quarterly traffic rose 46%, organic traffic rose 61%, and the firm reported an average of 30 qualified website leads a month.

The lesson is almost comically portable: before buying another channel, inspect the joins. Is the blog connected to the site? Can search engines read the firm's best thinking? Does a ranking matter to the client the firm actually wants? Jaffe's advantage is less a secret tactic than the ability to see public relations, content, search, brand and business development as one system.

Reputation has more than one audience

The system matters because a law firm's reputation does several jobs at once. It reassures a general counsel, gives a journalist confidence in a source, helps recruit a lateral partner and provides a ranking researcher with evidence. Jaffe's RankingsForLawyers practice tracks hundreds of awards and directories, then helps clients decide which opportunities deserve the labor. The restraint matters. Some badges are credible third-party validation. Others are expensive ornaments with a sales team.

In one rankings engagement, Jaffe learned that energy companies were looking beyond costly mega-firms and using rankings to vet midsize alternatives. It chose the National Law Journal's Midsize Hot List, interviewed lawyers, assembled matters and wrote the submission. The client made the list on its first attempt. The copyable idea is not “enter more awards.” It is to begin with the buyer's shortcut, identify the one credential that carries weight, and build the evidence backward from there.

The same specialization becomes more consequential during litigation or crisis. A conventional publicity instinct says to maximize attention. A legal instinct asks whether every sentence supports the case. In a recent high-profile matter, Jaffe developed messaging after a client's acquittal, helped generate broad coverage, trained the client for interviews and later aligned publicity for a civil suit with the legal strategy. Here, success was not noise alone. It was attention with fewer opportunities for the public narrative and courtroom narrative to collide.

A law firm rarely lacks expertise. It lacks a clean route from expertise to evidence, and from evidence to attention.

A virtual office with institutional memory

Jaffe was distributed long before remote work became a corporate argument. Its senior consultants work virtually across the United States. That structure lets the agency cover clients and media markets without pretending that every useful person lives near one headquarters. It also supports what Jaffe calls a lifestyle-agency culture: a public roster of parents, artists, runners, actors, community leaders, pet owners and even barrel racers, treated as identities rather than distractions.

The culture faced a sharper test in 2012, when Jay Jaffe died following surgery. The agency responded by naming Vivian Hood, Terry M. Isner and Melinda Wheeler - all longtime leaders - to a management committee. In 2014 the three assumed ownership. Succession was not imported. It was promoted from the people who understood the clients, the rituals and the economics already in motion. For a reputation business built on trust, continuity itself became a form of communication.

The model is less persuasive when a company needs mass consumer reach, deep international execution or a software platform instead of senior counsel. It also depends on clients willing to supply evidence, access and attorney time. No agency can manufacture a credible ranking submission from an empty matter list, or turn guarded experts into useful public voices without their participation.

But for legal organizations, Jaffe occupies an intelligible place in the market: more specialized than a general PR shop, broader than a rankings boutique, and more flexible than assembling every discipline in-house. Forty-eight years after lawyers were given greater freedom to advertise, the industry's hardest communication problem remains oddly stable. Knowing something is not the same as being known for it.