By Hugh Berkson as told to Plain Dealer Reporter Marcia Pledger

The Company: Hermann, Cahn & Schneider LLP, a specialty law firm in downtown Cleveland, Ohio, concentrates primarily in civil litigation. The 15-person law firm, includes a practice with Hugh Berkson, who focuses in the representation of investors against their brokers, investment advisors and insurance agents.

The Mistake: Even though our competitors were pouring themselves into a variety of marketing efforts, we ignored them believing that the work would find us. It always had, for about 30 years. The long-standing practice of this law firm was to do no advertising of any kind. But at the same time, I knew we could do better.

My biggest mistake was relying too long on the traditional business model of doing good work and believing that more work would find you as a result. We had a hard time coming to grips with the way the legal profession markets.

Ten years ago I moved into an area of representing people who lost money from misdeeds with investments. It's an area of practice that is not typically handled in courtrooms. Generally the only place you can seek resolution is arbitration. We're up against law firms all over the country, all soliciting people who have disputes in the securities industry whether it involves a stock, bond, insurance product or other investments, including Ponzi schemes.

Our practice group was doing well. But when I attended annual meetings from the Public Investors Arbitration Bar Association, I spoke with colleagues who were doing better than we were. We came back thinking, they're not any better than us and we want their work.

We always thought that advertising was unprofessional. But we knew we had to start marketing ourselves in order to be successful and competitive.

The Fix: About five years ago we started marketing gradually. First we started with passive efforts like creating a separate website for our practice, called the stock market loss group. Then we increasingly became more aggressive, by adding blog entries and constantly writing about hot topics on our website called stockmarketloss.com.

This website has gone through several iterations. Now our home page has bold statements like, "We learned this game by working for the enemy. Today, we work solely on the side of abused investors."

Marketing has made a difference in our practice. And we've tried various means, from going after the masses online to taking more direct approaches.

A few years ago we started running targeted ads in the newspaper. A short ad might say, "Did you have an account with broker X and lost money? If so, please call us." It worked.

We've been taking a series of baby steps with marketing and we're constantly trying to do it better. We're up against firms that devote a quarter of a million dollars on website marketing alone, firms that constantly run large ads in local papers and send mail directly to potential clients in this state who were affected by bad investments.

Two years ago when Ohio investors in this market started getting letters from out-of-state firms about the Medical Capital Holdings investigation of lending activities, I taught myself in one weekend to create a website just for information about that case. We ended up representing 60 households.

We changed our attitude and our approach, but marketing is a job within itself. Now we're at a point where we need more help and we're meeting with ad agencies.

Now we're convinced that lawyers can market in a professional and dignified way.