May 22nd, 2014

You want me to violate what law?

imposter

Who’s hiding behind that Google ad?

It isn’t often that someone emails me out of the blue and asks me to commit a misdemeanor. So I guess this wasn’t just another day.

Welcome to another edition of:   outsource your marketing = outsource your ethics. Today, perhaps, we can add to that equation that you might end out surrendering your money, license and liberty as well.

The email came to me from a Utah digital marketing firm called Lead PPC, from its CEO Grant James. I get pitches from marketeers all the time (“first page of Google!!!”) and generally just delete before reading, but I look sometimes to see if there’s any new scam under the sun.

The pitch was simple: The company would use the names of other personal injury attorneys as keywords for Google and my name would pop up in an ad. In other words, they want me to trade on the names of my “competitors” (a/k/a friends and colleagues).  This was the emailed pitch:

By staying away from the expensive $100+ cost per click keywords, we get right to the good stuff that is cheap, targeted, and needs help now.  Mostly, people are searching for the names of your top competitors who are advertising on radio, tv, and billboards.  We show up above them on Google and Bing, and they call us instead of them.

Whoa.  Now I may not always be the sharpest knife in the block  — just ask my kids —  but I do know that trading on the name of someone else is, what we call in legalese, a big, fat, hairy, ugly no-no. This is New York’s Civil Rights Law §50, also known as the right to privacy (and elsewhere, in various forms, the right to publicity):

A person, firm or corporation that uses for advertising purposes, or for the purposes of trade, the name, portrait or picture of any living person without having first obtained the written consent of such person, or if a minor of his or her parent or guardian, is guilty of a misdemeanor.

And in Civil Rights Law §51, there is a private right of action, and this includes both compensatory and punitive damages. In other words, I could be sued by the people whose names I’ve appropriated. And unlike other suits against me, this one could actually have merit.

In addition to the prospect of criminal and civil problems, there is also the prospect of action against my license under the Code of Professional Responsibility for false and deceptive conduct (Rule 7.1(a)(1)), implying that the better-known lawyer is associated with my firm (Rule 7.1(c)(2)) and using “hidden computer codes that, if displayed, would violate these Rules” (Rule 7.1(g)).

Grant James - LeadPPC

Grant James, CEO of LeadPPC

Figuring  that my understanding of what he suggested might just, perhaps, be the result of a poorly written email, or maybe that I didn’t understand the technology, I replied to Mr. James seeking clarity:

Hi Grant.

I read through your email and didn’t understand something:

Mostly, people are searching for the names of your top competitors who are advertising on radio, tv, and billboards.  We show up above them on Google and Bing, and they call us instead of them. 

What does this mean?

Simple enough, right? But his response was to make clear that I had it right the first time, that this was a dishonest, misbegotten, bastardization of legal marketing. He responded by giving me the names of prominent Texas trial lawyers he had misappropriated:

Hey. Yeah sorry if this was a little vague or confusing.

An example would be like in Dallas and Houston where we spend most of our budget on terms related to Jim Adler, Brian Loncar, ijustgothit.com, radlaw, and other terms for competitors.

What happens is that people hear a radio commercial and they can’t remember the website, so they search for what they can remember about the lawyer.

So if a guy searches for Brian Loncar, we know that they were most likely in an accident. If we rank for #1-2 on PPC, especially mobile, they click on us and call in.

A prospect typing in the name of a competitor term as opposed to “personal injury lawyer” is a much hotter prospect and further down the buying path. Additionally, these terms are much cheaper and less competitive than the broader terms everyone is bidding on and pushing up the prices.

The strategy works best in larger cities where law firms are advertising heavily on radio, tv, etc.

Texas, we have a problem.

Leaving aside the marketeer for a moment, what lawyer would do such a thing to another? I wanted to know, but since I’m in New York the Google ad words didn’t pop up in my market when I searched.

But, funny enough, I happen to know ace Dallas criminal defense lawyer blogger Mark Bennett. And Mark has written his fair share of postings about shady marketing tactics.

Screen Shot 2014-05-21 at 11.20.02 AM

So he Googalized those more prominent names that Grant James had kindly told me he had misappropriated, and up popped the website (txcarwreck.com) of attorney Ben Abbott in the Google ads.  You can see one of the to the right, where Brian Loncar was Googled. Bennett has screen shots of others.

You will notice that Bennett searched only for the name, and didn’t add lawyer, car accident, or any other popular buzzword.  Just the name. And up pops Ben Abbott’s ad.

As it happens, swiping the name of another person in order to exploit it is also a problem in Texas. It sure looks like Ben Abbott can be sued, and I’m guessing Grant James and his SEO company as well.

Now I’m also going to guess, simply because I fancy myself a kind and beneficent person, that Grant James is utterly ignorant of the law. I think I’m being charitable when I wrote that he probably knows that swiping the names of others to trade on them is a pretty scummy black hat tactic, but that he doesn’t know the legal ramifications. Or he knows but just doesn’t care.

But what would be the excuse of attorney Ben Abbott?

While I know that black hat marketing techniques go on, and have written about them in the past, I never really guessed it would come at me in such a bold and obvious way.

Who, I wanted to know, would he target? So I asked and he responded:

I would need to work together with you to put together a list of 15-20 of the top competitors in NY.  It would be the same guys who advertise on radio, tv, and billboards.

So then I moved the conversation to problems with his scheme, with a nice open-ended query to get his thinking, to see how he could justify this:

I don’t know, Grant, the whole thing about using the names of other lawyers to promote myself doesn’t really sound kosher.

What came back was a very long email about how Google operates and what Google allows and doesn’t allow and Google this and Google that, as if Google was a law of some kind and could be waved in front of judge and jury as a defense.

BenAbbottTexasLawyer-Standing

Ben Abbott, Texas lawyer

To Ben Abbott, who should know better, I asked:

Mr. Abbott:

I’m writing an article about your using the names of other Texas trial lawyers as part of your advertising. This includes Jim Adler and Brian Loncar.

When their names are Googled, your ad pops up. Would you care to comment about why you think this is acceptable marketing?

Thank you.

He hasn’t written back yet. If he does, I may update this.

This is, by the way, part of the Wild West of marketing. A year ago in Wisconsin, under presumably different laws, a court held that stealing someone’s name to use as a hidden advertising keyword might past muster in a civil suit, as in that state (unlike New York) there was apparently no statute. There was no word in Eric Goldman’s Forbes column about the ethical implications. (Update: Under Florida law, this is not an ethics violation. I think is should be.)

But I think the message is pretty clear that, once again my friends, when those marketeers come-a-callin’, you had best remember that they become your agent when you hire them for marketing. Marketing is part of attorney ethics. If you elect to outsource your marketing then you have outsourced your ethics. And reputation. And possibly your bank account and liberty.

It sucks to be a test case.

 

January 30th, 2014

But I Didn’t Write That Stuff on My Website!

Passing-the-Baton-600x400

Have you passed off your ethics and reputation to someone else lately?

The orthopedist was on the witness stand last week. He was well credentialed as defendant’s expert: top schools, top training, top position.

And then came plaintiff’s cross examination. The issue was the relationship between disc bulges and disc herniations. The doctor said there was a difference. And that bulges were the result of degeneration, otherwise known as the aging process.

(Some doctors are (in)famous for calling everything degeneration, because, you know, we start to degenerate when we are born.)

Then plaintiff’s attorney, Harlan Wittenstein, posed a general question to the doctor about bulges and herniations being the same. He denied it.

But Wittenstein, a seasoned trial attorney, just happened to have, oddly enough, a 24 x 36 blow up of the doctor’s web page where that assertion existed.  He got it into evidence as a prior inconsistent statement. This was the website language:

A herniated disc, also called a bulging disc, ruptured disc or slipped disc, occurs when the inner core of the spinal disc pushes out through the outer layer of the disc.

Herniation describes an abnormality of the intervertebral disc that is also known as a “slipped,” “ruptured” or “bulging” disc.

The doctor kept saying, and I paraphrase here since I don’t have the transcript, ‘I see that its in my website, but its not true.  I didn’t write it.  Someone else writes the content.’

You know what happens when you outsource your marketing? Your ethics and reputation get outsourced also. And this applies to everyone, not just lawyers.

 

August 1st, 2013

Industrializing the Legal Profession

LexviaThe slick marketing packet landed on my desk and, just as I was about to toss it into the circular file — which is actually rectangular but that isn’t the point of this post — the tagline for the company hit me: “Industrializing the Legal Profession.”

Ugh. I didn’t even know what the hell it did as a company and I hated it already. Because, you know, I don’t have any clients that want to be industrialized. They want to be humanized.

Being industrialized, in fact, may be one of the reasons they called me. Sometimes a simple human apology will stop a person from ever calling a lawyer. Pro tip: People like to be treated as people, not as files.

By the time folks get to my office, they may already be part of the machinery of police reports, no-fault exams, claims reps and other indices of our bureaucratic society. The series that I have been doing on quickie medical-legal exams, in fact, is one of the sick symptoms of this system.

There is a good chance they will then be funneled through a litigation system where they have to wait in long lines for their cases to be heard, and not understanding why it takes as long as it does, no matter how efficient the lawyer is.

If I told them my law practice was to “industrialize” them, as opposed to humanize them, what do you think the reaction would be?

So I cracked open the packet of materials from Lexvia — the culprit with the awful tagline — and found that they are a company that outsources legal work to India. And they were supported($) by my local bar association and listed a whole bunch of firms and lawyers that I know, some of whom I actually like and have had drinks with at lawyer functions.

Thankfully — and I hope this is a bright spot — I did not find that tagline when I Googled it — which means it may be brand new — though they do have on one of their pages “Industrializing the Litigation Process,” which isn’t a whole lot better.

So a word to Lexvia, don’t use this tagline elsewhere. The reaction, I think, will not be good to those of us that think about such things.

And as to the lawyers that use such companies, ask yourselves what your clients would think about it. You say they don’t know? But I have the list, marked “Confidential.” And you know what? I didn’t agree to that. Nor did any of the other gazillion lawyers that this packet was sent to. Any of us could easily scan this page and put this up on the web. Easy peasy.

What would your clients think if they knew that work on their cases was being outsourced to India? Do they have any idea how close you are to being exposed by being placed into a mass mailing?

And if you think they answer is, “Hey, the clients won’t mind!”, then why not put it on your website?

Here’s the tagline I like: Think humanize, not industrialize.