March 2004 Issue

Cover Story

Casting for Clients

Randolph M. James does a lot more than simply hang out a shingle to an­nounce his solo law practice in Winston-Salem, N.C. That would be like fishing in a pond with a cane pole.

He’s trawling the seas.

And he’s casting ever-widening nets. James still runs an ad in the Yellow Pages, though he’s been shrinking it the past few years, down to dollar-bill size from three-fourths of a page. The smaller one costs him $36,000 a year and he plans to cut back more, keeping just enough space to list prac­tice areas and, most important, his Web site address.

Feeling his way around in recent years, James tried paying $1,500 for referrals from a products liability Web site and got noth­ing for it. It might be that consumers searching the Web for a lawyer understand terms like “lemon law” better than they do “prod­ucts liability.” He also pays a bit more than $100 annually to subscribe to www.bigclassaction.com, but the big one hasn’t come his way yet.

Feature Section

Opening Sentences

Karen Marie Shook never had met William G. Milliken until just a few months ago. But Milli­ken already had profoundly touched Shook’s life twice.

Children Without a Country

Depending on whom you ask, Malik Jarno is either: A mentally challenged, or­phaned teen­ager born in Gui­nea, with an IQ of about 60, who arrived in the Unit­ed States bearing false identi­fica­tion papers and a plane ticket ob­tained by a friend in France who grew tired of caring for him; or he is a 20-something man, possibly born in the Congo, who tried to sneak into the States using papers he knew and understood were fake.