A voicemail to a Kansas City law firm, McCollum and Griggs, LLC, was so inappropriate that the firm decided to actually post it on its Web site, and it is currently going viral across the country.

“Recently, a company on the  West Coast called us (McCollum & Griggs LLC) to try and sell a domain name related to “Kansas City personal injury, ” is the message posted on the law firm’s new site.  “We consulted with our Kansas City web designers (Kansas City Web Design & SEO) and they advised against the purchase, and we in turn politely called back to pass on the opportunity.”

Kansas City Web Design created the Bottom Line Communications Web site earlier this year.

The original voicemail to the law firm has now been picked up by national tech sites like WebProNews and legal regional and national blog sites such as the [American Bar Association] ABA Journal.  Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team and de-facto spokesman for their search engine even tweeted about the voicemail.

The voicemail has racked up over 85,000 views the first four days and counting.

According to Phil Singleton at KC Web Design, “People have been calling and commenting for more information on the identity of the caller, the company behind the message and the domain for sale, so McCollum & Griggs have decided to release more info to Bottom Line Communications.”

Here is statement from personal injury attorneys McCollum & Griggs, LLC,  Attorney Annette Griggs:

“I received a call from a guy named Shawn who said he was from Seattle Software Developers.  Shawn had left me a message that he had a domain name for sale that would get us to the “#1 spot on Google.

“We just happened to be in the middle of re-doing our website so I returned his call and I spoke with him about purchasing the domain name of ‘KansasCityPersonalInjuryAttorney.com.’  He told me they had purchased the domain name a couple of years prior for a law firm in Kansas City for which they were developing their website.  He then said that law firm “ended up flaking” on them.

“He told me they wanted $6,000 to sell this domain name but it was worth $10,000.  I then called Phil Singleton, our trusted SEO / website designer, who advised us that it was not a good purchase for us.  I called Shawn back and told him that we were not interested and I thanked him for the offer.”

According to Griggs, that was when things got interesting.

“Then, Steve (the purported boss of Shawn) called our office and spoke with Pam Lane, our paralegal.  He left a message with her asking me to call him although Pam told him once again that we were not interested in purchasing the domain name.  When I did not return his call we then got this voicemail left for us, which sounded to us like a drunken rant, the following evening.

“Since that date, we found out that the phone number from whom the sales called belongs to Steven O’Brien.   Mr. O’Brien denies that he was employed by Seattle Software Developers but stated that when he called he was just helping them out by trying to sell domain names.  Mr. O’Brien also denies remembering making the call to our office.”

Some of the quotes and claims on the Seattle Software Developers site:

“Seattle Software Developers was the world’s first web-design firm”

“…takes your dot com from business plan to #1 on Google”

Here is a quote from Phil Fischer, CEO of Seattle Software Developers, from an article earlier this year: “If you own a domain name that ends only in .com, and that domain name matches exactly what key words a consumer types into Google or Bing looking for your business, that domain name will always produce #1 results on the organic search results.”

Maybe the lesson to be learned by all this is that often a company’s best source for work can be done better locally than by some nameless, faceless company in another state.

The second lesson might be that you should watch what messages leave on voicemail to a law firm…