USA: Anwaltskanzlei speziell für Männer

Die St. Louis Post-Dispatch enthält heute einen interessanten Artikel über eine Anwaltskanzlei, die sich gezielt auf männliche Mandanten ausgerichtet hat.

Highly specialized firms for specific groups of people and cutthroat mentalities is nothing new in the world of law. But Cordell & Cordell may be one of the most successful firms when it comes to capitalizing on the Internet and, in particular, the rage behind the fathers' rights movement, sometimes dubbed "mad dads."

Backed by influential nonprofits and advocacy groups like the American Coalition for Fathers and Children, the movement has argued for years — particularly on the Internet — that family courts are biased in favor of women and that men are losing time with their children and sometimes their assets because of it.

(…) The firm's founder, Joseph Cordell of Wildwood, is quick to say he is not a political activist. But he doesn't shy from controversy, nor his belief that feminists have ruled family court.

"Exacerbating things further is the feminist movement and its shrill insistence on women's interests to the utter exclusion of the underlying merits of a given case," he writes on his personal website, fathersworld.com.

(…) Cordell & Cordell's guys-only approach has successful imitators in many cities, and there are also firms catering exclusively to women. But Cordell was one of the first to intuit that men — sometimes reticent to share their feelings — embrace the Web and sites laced with arguments from the fathers' rights movement.

Moderated by the firm's full-time marketing director and six paid employees, the website, with some 200,000 posts and thousands of daily hits, offers calculators to determine the likelihood that a wife is cheating (low, medium or high) and the chances of mom winning custody in court.

Cordell also publicly disputes rhetoric he feels is biased against men. He recently campaigned against a national advertisement on domestic abuse. He said the ad profiled men by improperly implying young boys will grow up to abuse women if fathers fail to actively teach them not to hit women.