New York Personal Injury Law Blog » Keches Law Group, Marketing

 

May 23rd, 2012

The U Agency is the One That Stole My Stuff (Updated)

This post was substantially edited on May 25, 2012.

A lawyer “blog” stole a post of mine wholesale, regarding medical malpractice tort reform in Texas being a bust. I ran the story on May 23rd. This is a copy of my post that they used: LawGroup 5.23.12

The marketing company responsible has now come forward and owned up to the deed.

This is the explanation of John Uniac of The U Agency, which has a Massachusettes telephone number:

I wanted to reach out to you regarding a post that seems to have come from your blog. I apologize as the team is instructed to reach out to the original content producer to see if they would like it posted and then linked back to them as well as full credit given.

Two lessons learned: One is for lawyers that when they outsource their marketing their reputations go along with it. The other is for the marketeers that are busy writing/stealing “content” to post on law firm websites. Here’s a thought, let the lawyers write their own pieces. There is simply no way that some marketing agency is going to create quality legal content.

The U Agency, ironically, doesn’t seem to have its own website. While the graphic you now see in the upper right hand corner says www.theuagency.com, there is no actual website at that address. Go figure. But he does have a Linked-In profile that says, in part, about the company:

We help you get social but we make sure you get it right!

Well, he didn’t get it right. I don’t know if the “team” he refers to is an actual group of people in a real office, or if this is some team in Bangalore for whom this is just another “create content” project.

Finally, while you can still see the lawyer’s name in pdfs, it is gone from this post for the purpose of Google searching. I even took it out of the URL (hope no one linked to it, otherwise it will be a dead page).

I took the name out to uphold my part of the bargain that I wrote about: If the law firm coughed up the name of their black hat marketers, for me to publish here, I would edit this post to remove their name. Done.

The idea for letting the lawyer off the hook if they cough up the name of the marketeer engaging in slimy conduct, by the way, comes from Popehat. See: Too Seldom Is The Question Asked: Who Are Be Defensing Our Criminals? and also:   It’s Time To Ask: Have We Adequately Investigated The Link Between Attorney Comment Spam And Masturbation-Aid Devices?

2nd Update, 5/27/12: See the comments regarding concerns the marketer has also fouled up by using the kosher mark (a hechsher) of the Orthodox Union.  That O(U) is the most widely recognized mark of kosher foods in the country.

10 thoughts on “The U Agency is the One That Stole My Stuff (Updated)”

  2. I notice that they stole it by reprinting it, in full, with links intact (as far as I can tell), but linking the title to your post. Not sure if they did that in a lame and inadequate gesture towards giving you credit, or because they just thieved all the HTML outright.

  3. Not sure if they did that in a lame and inadequate gesture towards giving you credit

    I doubt credit was at issue, because that would entail actual thinking, and no person that is actually thinking would steal something wholesale. For a law firm.

  4. Actually, I think the Keches people wrote it a little better though.

    In all seriousness, I’d like to think Google’s algorithm is smart enough to figure out which site posted the article first, and ding the duplicate content site.

    I did a search for “Study Says Texas Medical Malpractice Tort “Reform” Is A Bust (Is Congress Listening?).” The Heches site isn’t on the first page, and your blog is the first two results. Definitely tacky/dishonest and it might even be hurting their “blog.”

    • I’d like to think Google’s algorithm is smart enough to figure out which site posted the article first

      While not privy to the algorithm, I’d bet Google is less concerned with first and more concerned with page rank.

  5. Was just catching up on my RSS feed, so I clicked through to this post expecting an update. I guess the marketing company failed to tell their clients to set up G Alerts for the firm name.

  6. Pingback: Throwing The Marketeers Under the Bus | Popehat