Competing for Clients, and Paying by the Click
You can do cool things with Google, like take the pulse of the legal profession. — Google is, of course, more than a search engine. It also sells advertising, including the shaded "sponsored links" that run next to the real search results.
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece lands at a telling moment for Google's ad machine: two days earlier its shares pierced $600 for the first time even as coverage flagged growing risks around the business, and since mid-2007 the company has been fighting a landmark legal challenge to its sponsored-links model — first reported in July, then picked up by the Times in August — over who may bid on whose trademarks. The article looks at that same auction from the demand side: professionals, notably lawyers, buying clicks to win clients.
It also follows the NYT's June profile of how relentlessly Google tunes its search results, which is what keeps the sponsored slots next to them valuable enough for firms to fight over. The stakes run both ways — the same pay-per-click mechanism drawing law firms in is the one being stress-tested in court.
First-order effects
- Law firms competing for clients now treat Google's sponsored-link auctions as a primary acquisition channel, with their cost per new client set directly by what rivals are willing to bid per click.
- Google collects revenue from an expanding base of professional-services advertisers while simultaneously defending the legality of the keyword-ad model in the ongoing trademark suit.
Second-order effects
- Firms priced out of contested keywords are pushed toward broader or adjacent terms, inflating bids across practice areas and making the auction itself the competitive battleground rather than firm reputation alone.
- The trademark dispute over keyword ads forces every advertiser buying rival names — not just the litigants — to weigh legal risk against reach, shaping bidding behavior across the platform.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, client acquisition in professions built on referrals and directories migrates toward whoever operates the click auction, concentrating gatekeeping power over professional markets in the search platform.
- The courts' rulings on keyword advertising will effectively write the pricing and permission rules for auction-based marketing across other regulated professions that follow lawyers onto paid search.
The trend: Professional client acquisition is shifting from referrals and directories to pay-per-click search auctions, with Google as both toll-taker and defendant in the lawsuits defining who may bid on what.