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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete‎. Liz Read! Talk! 23:05, 30 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

James Helm

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James Helm (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)
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A seemingly promotional article about a marketing professional and social media influencer who only received significant coverage in one article in The Inquirer [1]. He was also quoted and discussed in Philadelphia Magazine [2], but he was not the subject of the article—I don't think this counts as significant independent coverage. On the whole, fails WP:BASIC. JBchrch talk 21:21, 11 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Keep in addition to the Inquirer, Philadelphia Magazine has more than 15 significant paragraphs [3]:

No one represents the it’s-only-a-business new breed as much as TopDog Law, the entity launched by James Helm in 2019, not long after finishing — perhaps tellingly — a dual JD/MBA program at Rutgers.
“It comes down to unit economics,” Helm said cheerfully on a legal industry marketing podcast last year. (The TopDog founder, who grew up in Delco and now spends most of his time in Scottsdale, Arizona, declined my request for a sit-down interview.) In the podcast Helm went on to explain that you first have to know the average fee you generate on a case — if it’s $10,000, you have work to do; if it’s $25,000, you’re doing pretty well. Then you need to calculate the cost of acquiring a client. If you understand those two things — and if the delta between them is large enough — “then I can get aggressive about acquiring new customers, and I can do it profitably.”
Simple, right?
It’s a formula Helm has used with great success. Six years after launching TopDog, Helm’s operation now has a presence, according to its website, in more than 35 cities across the country, from Ann Arbor and Atlanta to Washington, D.C. Thousands of calls and contacts come in each week.
Key to the success have been decisions Helm made early on, starting with the consumer-friendly TopDog name. “I think traditionally [law] firms have been very bad at branding their businesses,” Helm said on the podcast. “Every other industry has names that are easy to say, easy to sell, easy to remember. Whereas with law firms, the brand wasn’t the focus.” In dubbing his outfit TopDog — a moniker that could just as easily have been used on, say, an energy drink or a new brand of kibble — he landed on something that both was easy to remember and conjured up winning. “I think a large part of our success is due to the name,” he said. “TopDog gets you top dollar.”
Helm’s second outside-the-box decision was to focus on social media when it came to marketing. In part the strategy was born of necessity — Helm didn’t have enough money to advertise on TV; even Google AdWords was out of his league. But it also spoke to his age (27 at the time); Instagram and TikTok were as natural to him as TV was to Rand Spear.
“We really thought there was room to revolutionize [legal marketing], especially on the social media front,” says Ian Harrington, TopDog’s first marketing director. (Harrington would go on to work for Pond Lehocky and is now co-founder, with Ryan Makris and Kate Schenkel, of Very Decent Marketer.) “At the time, no law firm was doing social media with any kind of success or results. It wasn’t by accident that we saw that as an opportunity. James was young; he was good-looking. He wasn’t as good on camera as he is now. That actually took a long time to get right. But we were willing to put in the reps to figure it out.”
Early on, TopDog’s social strategy was based on Helm sharing his personal story. A high school wrestler, he’d started taking prescription painkillers following an injury at age 17, and he’s said he spent eight years as an addict before finally entering rehab while in law school. The message to potential clients: I know what it’s like to be down and out. I can help you get your life back.
But in time that strategy gave way to something more over-the-top — kinetic videos of a hyper Helm doing everything from mugging at the camera to rapping. “We had to get our name out there by being bombastic and creating the TopDog persona,” says Harrington. “The algorithms of the platforms push the louder, the bombastic, the faster-cuts kind of stuff. And we really leaned into that.”
As is increasingly the norm in the personal injury law business, the cases Helm generates — through social media or radio or all those TopDog billboards — are not primarily handled by him or any lawyer working for him, but by other lawyers around the country. In fact, if you look closely at the language, you see that TopDog Law isn’t really even a law firm. Helm’s LinkedIn page describes it as “a leading case acquisition and plaintiff intake platform,” while the TopDog website calls it “a national network for law firms licensed to practice in their applicable states.”
The uber-referral model is not one every lawyer — even in the personal injury realm — is comfortable with. “I think it’s important for the consumer to understand who they’re retaining to represent them,” says Spear. “I’m here every day. I work morning till night. I like meeting with clients.”
Perhaps more to the point: Advertising done primarily for the purpose of referring cases to other firms actually runs afoul of Pennsylvania’s Rules of Professional Conduct. As the rules put it: “It is misleading to the public for a lawyer or law firm, with knowledge that the lawyer or law firm will not be handling a majority of the cases attracted by advertising, to nonetheless advertise for those cases only to refer the cases to another lawyer whom the client did not initially contact.”
When I email Helm about this, I get a quick reply from his general counsel, Sean Berberian. He says that because Helm — through the entity Helm Law LLC — maintains joint responsibility for all cases, he’s not, in fact, “referring” matters and is, therefore, “absolutely compliant with Pennsylvania rules of ethics, as well as other applicable jurisdictions.”
As it happens, none of this may even matter. When I ask Thomas Wilkinson, the former Pennsylvania Bar Association president, about the relevant section of Pennsylvania’s rules, he essentially shrugs. “There is not a tremendous amount of policing in Pennsylvania of improper advertising. Sometimes that policing only occurs when there’s been a complaint about the quality of representation or a client feels they’ve been duped in some way. But for the most part, if clients are pleased with the outcomes, they don’t care a great deal about how they got to the lawyer.”
I understand Wilkinson’s point. And yet it still strikes me as odd, the equivalent of a restaurateur — say, Marc Vetri! — running an ad for his restaurant, but then telling you when you call for a reservation that he’s going to get you a table at one of Michael Solomonov’s or Jose Garces’s restaurants.
Then again, for better or worse, what TopDog and so many other personal injury firms are selling is less legal services than the idea of suing in the first place.

His billboard is covered by Philly Voice [4], a profile in OK magazine [5], his social media in Arizona [6]. Judging this against WP:BASIC, "People are presumed notable if they have received significant coverage in multiple published secondary sources that are reliable, intellectually independent of each other, and independent of the subject," there are five published independent sources. Little Astros Sign (talk) 11:53, 13 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This article is not significant independent coverage of James Helm, the person: it's mostly quotes of him and his staff about his company and the company's business strategy, with some light background info about Helm as founder. If anything it could count as coverage of TopDog, the company he created. More generally, Helm appears to makes a lot of noise about himself on social media and in the real world, so it's not surprising that some news outlet would quote him or mention him, but that still does not count as significant independent coverage. Separately, I am not convinced that OK! is a reliable source. JBchrch talk 12:56, 13 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I have found additional sources about him [7] [8] but to me the article seems to be coverage about both him and his company but are you saying that you think that there is coverage for the company not him? I think the opposite because the articles all describe him as a person as the creator of the billboard, and Philadelphia Magazine article mentions him 18 times. Anyway, WP:BASIC — "the depth of coverage in any given source is not substantial, then multiple independent sources may be combined to demonstrate notability" — if Inquirer is already one independent source then the other six sources can combine to at least be one (which is more than one meaning it is multiple)? Little Astros Sign (talk) 13:14, 13 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I cannot access the Law360 article, but the Houston Chronicle article does not appear to offer significant independent coverage of James Helm as a person: it covers the billboard story, mentions that Helm is the person who created it, and quotes Helm. Looking at the sources you provided, the coverage falls in my view under the second prong of the rule you cite, i.e. "trivial coverage of a subject by secondary sources is not usually sufficient to establish notability" (emphasis mine). JBchrch talk 13:24, 13 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Hundreds of Wikipedia articles use OK! as a reliable source [9] Little Astros Sign (talk) 20:23, 14 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Keep: Three articles plus a few short ones is enough for NBASIC. 🄻🄰 15:01, 14 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
May I ask which three articles you are referring to? JBchrch talk 19:52, 14 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Relisting comment: Relisting. Please do not introduce large amounts of content to an AFD discussion which should focus on the condition of the article and possible sources, not reproducing those sources here.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Liz Read! Talk! 21:51, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Relisting comment: One more try.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Liz Read! Talk! 23:22, 25 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete Rough source assessment. I was not able to access the Law360 article, but I assume it's coverage about the sign more than it's coverage about the person.
Source assessment table prepared by User:PacificDepths
Source Independent? Reliable? Significant coverage? Count source toward GNG?
~ Substantially an interview, which is not independent Yes This is a column, not a news piece. But the Inquirer should do some basic fact-checking. Yes is about the subject ~ Partial
Yes Yes generally reputable ~ A few lines about the subject but mainly about the company ~ Partial
Yes generally yes Yes generally yes No Mentions subject's company but not the subject at all ✘ No
~ short profile that appears to be from an interview No See Wikipedia:Reliable Sources Noticeboard discussion (direct link) Yes ✘ No
Yes No Nothing about subject, just describes as "influencer" ✘ No
Yes Yes No No significant coverage of subject ✘ No
This table may not be a final or consensus view; it may summarize developing consensus, or reflect assessments of a single editor. Created using {{source assess table}}.
— 🌊PacificDepths (talk) 06:46, 28 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
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