Attorneys’ Divorce Videos Have All the Sizzle of a Toothache

First, you see the title: DIVORCE. Then, a patriotic shot of a courthouse, flag flying. A close-up of an office door plaque serves to introduce your host, MR. ROISMAN. Finally, there’s the shirt-sleeved Gerald Roisman himself, shaking hands with a “client,” preparing to fulfill the promise of this $29.95 videotape’s subtitle: “An Attorney Tells What You Should Know.”

“Arnold Becker’s Video Guide to Divorce” had better production values, frankly. Arnie of NBC’s “L.A. Law” fame worked with a video coach first, shrugged on one of his nattier Armanis, looked right into the lens and oozed advice: “If there’s someone to blame, blame them. If there’s papers to serve, serve them. If there’s bank accounts to freeze, freeze them. Divorce isn’t death; you don’t have to mourn. What you have to do, is act.”

Not Roisman’s style. He’s less dramatic, less tailored and less blond. And since he doesn’t have the direct-mail muscle of Dave Meyer behind him, he’s sold a lot fewer videos (50 to 75, at last count) than Arnie did.

The Roisman advantage, however, is that Arnie, portrayed by actor Corbin Bernsen, lives and peddles videos only on television. Whereas this guy from Hartford with the receding hairline and the golf ball collection in his office is a real divorce lawyer with a real video.

And he’s not the only one.

Turns out there’s another divorce lawyer in Columbia, S.C., Jan L. Warner by name, who’s selling his own $29.95 videotape via an 800 phone number. This one uses graphics, printed titles that say things like “Channel Your Energy Positively” and “Have a Life Management Plan.”

Warner keeps his jacket on, takes a more nuts-and-bolts approach than Roisman, and drawls.

Both lawyers say their video inspirations long predate Arnie Becker’s entrepreneurial escapades of last season; supervising producer William Finkelstein says no one at “L.A. Law” had heard of any actual divorce videos before Arnie’s was invented.

Thus, it’s hard to know whether life is imitating art in this trendlet, or vice versa. All you can say with confidence is that Arnie’s got the best writers.

Roisman, who estimates he’s handled more than 3,000 divorces over 27 years of practice, had his brainstorm after seeing wee-hours television commercials for instructional videos such as Jack Nicklaus’ on golf.

Like lots of matrimonial specialists, he often spends his first hour or two (at $250 per) answering new clients’ very basic questions, offering very general reassurance and urging them to go home and think about things before they decide to proceed.

“People who first come in are very anxious, very upset, very nervous,” he says. “There is so much misunderstanding.”

Maybe, he mused, he could lay out some of the rudiments in his own “informational vehicle.”

Noodling over various formats, Roisman and his son, Peter, decided to reenact a first session with a client.

Peter Roisman, whose firm, Pro-Rep, represents athletes and entertainers, recruited an “actress-singer-model” client named Lisa Miller to play the about-to-be-ex-wife. She doggedly reads a list of questions that gives Gerald Roisman the chance to expound on such subjects as attorneys, fees, documents, property and custody.

The 37-minute tape was shot by a couple of video consultants last summer in Roisman’s conference room, enhanced for the occasion with a small sculpture of Justice holding her scales.

Roisman says he’s invested about $20,000 to produce the first thousand tapes, and needs to unload 650 to break even. Alas, ads in Connecticut newspapers brought only a ripple of response, and an attempt to generate reviews seems to have fizzled.

But a Hartford Courant business column about the video venture was picked up by the Associated Press, which has led to three radio and two TV appearances and--to much excitement in the law offices of Roisman & McClure--an inquiry from the staff of Maury Povich himself.

“My dream is to see (my father) and Corbin Bernsen on a talk show together,” Peter Roisman fantasizes. “On the Carson show or the Letterman show.”

This pairing might not be altogether to the 52-year-old Gerald Roisman’s advantage, but never mind. He’s getting a sufficient kick out of the media interest and colleagues teasing him about being a movie star; a potential profit of less than $10,000 on a thousand tapes doesn’t mean all that much to a guy who has a full practice and develops condominiums on the side.

Jan Warner is taking the business aspect a bit more seriously.

He won’t say how many copies of “How to Successfully Manage the Crisis of Divorce” he’s got stacked and ready to mail, but he’s hired a New York PR firm to flack the thing. What’s more, he’s planned a whole series of “life management videos” on topics like remarriage, prenuptial agreements and retirement planning. And he takes Visa and MasterCard.

A consumer advisory: Neither of these products will keep your average viewer riveted.

Roisman’s tape is funnier, unintentionally, because once his blow-dried client starts reading her questions and nodding understandingly nothing can derail her, not even the lawyer’s appalling anecdote about a visitation gone bad. Seems the husband had the two kids for the weekend, and, while the children were watching Saturday morning cartoons, he and his new girlfriend commenced “sexual relations” on the couch right in the same room.

“Hardly appropriate parenting!” Roisman says, growing uncharacteristically animated. “Hardly appropriate dynamics!”

But the actress-singer-model, instead of wailing or doubling over, just nods and plows on with the next question.

Warner, whose tape is distributed through his business, SoloSource, dispenses with dramatizations and simply talks to the camera. He has a more forceful delivery, gets into details about insurance policies and investments, and says things like “Don’t fight over the stainless steel.”

The two videos share a disclaimer: Both lawyers soberly warn that they cannot dispense legal advice in this fashion and that people contemplating divorce should see attorneys.

This tactic is meant to spare them Arnie Becker’s fate: He and his erstwhile business partner, Dave Meyer, were sued during this season’s “L.A. Law” by a woman who claimed she followed Arnie’s video advice and wound up with a lousy settlement. Arnie had to pay the woman to settle a breach of warranty claim.

“We’re not trying to warranty anything,” Roisman notes pointedly, “except that if the tape doesn’t spin around in your machine, we’ll replace it.”