I love it when readers share stories and examples of meaningful marketing. Last week I discovered a pretty interesting new way for lawyers to promote their services in a meaningful way; it’s an interesting concept that represents a big opportunity to move toward a new model of content aggregation.

Emilie Cole at LaunchSquad, a PR firm focused on new products and services, emailed me about her client, JD Supra, which is hoping to provide a way to serve useful information to people in a way that helps build the businesses of law firms. At JDSupra.com, lawyers can upload articles, court papers, legal briefs, and other documents so that they can be read by visitors to the site. The general idea is that people who are in the market for legal services will do some online research before hiring representation. If they find something useful at JD Supra, they may be especially inclined to hire the firm that uploaded said document. (See the nice coverage from The New York Times.)

Cole makes a great point about how this might revolutionize the way lawyers advertise their services:

[In the old model] they have a website… and maybe a terrible phone book ad. Part of their problem is that they can yell about how great they are until they’re blue in the face, but that still doesn’t convince you or me that we should seek their services. And how would we know if they’re any good anyway?”

Overall, this concept fits very well under what we call Solution marketing, which happens when brands find a way to provide some kind of value-added information for consumers, which is related to the brand or category itself. Anytime a brand creates an article or a consultant writes a blog (such as this!) we are marketing in this way. We all hope that by providing useful information, customers will repay us with their business.

But JD Supra creates further value through its content aggregation service. The problem with blogs and websites is that they live on isolated islands and depend almost entirely on personal networks and their position in Google searches for visitors. Brands have a hard time standing out, and consumers often don’t find the best information on Google. A growing trend is to aggregate content under a semi-walled garden, where higher-quality information is stored and well-tended. Wikipedia is a great example, as are Squidoo and Alltop. Search engines such as Google actually send more traffic to content aggregators, in turn, because they provide more of what the user is looking for.

WebMD is a kind of content aggregator as well, and it clearly has succeeded as a first-search source for millions of people. The downside of WebMD, though, is that it is a fully closed information marketplace. The company “owns” all of the content, which means huge cost, complexity, and lack of outside voices.

I had a chance to speak with the founder of JD Supra, Aviva Cuyler, as well. She started the firm after working for 12 years as a litigator and realizing that fellow attorneys were drafting the same documents over and over again. She pointed out that with so many legal services becoming commoditized, this service can help law firms work more efficiently so that they can cut costs and spend more time on value-added advice. Cuyler described four key business benefits of the service to contributors:

1. Attracts clients who are searching for information and end up impressed by the expertise of contributing firms
2. Improves networking, as lawyers search for specialists in specific areas, who they may hire to help out on a specific issue or refer business their way
3. Gains attention from the media, which is increasingly subscribing to JD Supra’s feeds and using the site for their own research. Reporters are starting to reach out to law firms that are submitting documents, and by quoting them, might generate further business.
4. Drives strong search results (SEO), as each uploaded document means another link back to the law firm from a trusted, valuable, high-traffic source

The service is expanding its usefulness by embracing the latest social networking tools as well. A Facebook app that it created allows members to show their contacts whenever they have uploaded a new document to JD Supra. And it has several specific Twitter feeds with news around topics such as Tech Law and Banking Law.

JD Supra even has a business model: While contribution is free, lawyers who submit documents must pay anywhere from $450 to $750 per year to add links to their profiles, websites, and email addresses. Hey, that’s less than a couple hours of work billed for most of the lawyers I know! So even one client landed through this effort could pay out this investment very quickly. The business model element helps ensure that the folks behind JD Supra keep improving the service continually.

I’d love to see something like this in the marketing world. There are countless agencies, consultants, and bloggers such as us out there talking to a relatively small audience. We all hope that some article is read by the right person with a huge following who, in turn, links to us. Instead, it would be incredible to have a central place where marketing experts could leave articles around specific topics. Readers would find and rate the articles, and the best thinkers and writers (rather than the best networkers) would see their work rise to the top.

Until then, I’ll keep doing my best to keep you coming back here, dear readers!