Category Archives: Attorney Ethics

 

January 22nd, 2010

FindLaw Uses Dead Child To Advertise Attorney Services


Demonstrating that, perhaps, there is no sewer deep enough for it to descend into, FindLaw has used the death of a child to promote the services of the lawyers that pay them fees.

On its Philadelphia Personal Injury Law Blog (coded as “nofollow” so that site doesn’t get Google juice) FindLaw‘s writer, Emily Grube, re-hashes the tragic accident of a nine-year old that was hit by a car while playing with its scooter. After the re-hash comes this deep-thinking analysis:

There are many difficult questions about this case: Was the driver aware that she hit White? Was she aware that he was under the car? Did she continue to drive in an attempt to flee the scene?

Truly profound. I know I feel more educated having read it. At the end of it comes the call-to-action: “If you have been involved in a similar situation such as a hit and run, or a pedestrian injury, you could discuss your possible personal injury case with…” blah, blah blah

The “blog” is one of the dreck-blogs that I wrote about previously (Are FindLaw’s “Blogs” Tainting Its Clients, Commentators and the Profession of Law?), that offer little content beyond repeating a local story, making damn sure the name of the victim is repeated in the event the victims (or their survivors) Google the event, and ends with a call-to-action. There is, of course, no comment area since discussion isn’t the point of the ad.

(If the name of the writer sound familiar, Ms. Grube also writes dreck-blogs for other FindLaw sites, having apparently left what little dignity she may have been born with in the dust.)

In my prior posting, FindLaw was using dead adults in its pseudo-blogs, which appear as little more than ads designed to chase clients. The extent to which such ad-blogs violate local ethics laws has yet to be explored by any ethics committee that I know of, though surely that day is coming soon.

So who sponsors this kind of crap? When you click their link, these are the firms I found at the top of the link, that would benefit from FindLaw‘s use of dead children in its ads:

The Law Offices of Eric Strand
West Chester, PA

Law Offices of Basil D. Beck, III
Norristown, PA

Law Offices of V. Erik Petersen
Harleysville, PA

Hark and Hark
Philadelphia, PA

Law Office of Henry S. Hilles, III
Norristown, PA

So long as lawyers continue to pay money to FindLaw for its services, this will no doubt continue. (See, FindLaw, How To Leave and Save Your Reputation.)

And the continued existence of such crap will continue to hurt the legal community and our clients, and make it even more difficult to find objective jurors.

Lastly, it’s worth noting that Mark Bennett had previously published a partial list of New York attorneys that were supporting this kind of conduct (Call This Notice). Yet FindLaw continues, and subjects more of their clients to being associated with its ugliness. So it appears that FindLaw doesn’t really care about the reputations of the very people that hire them. Considering that FindLaw is the agent of these firms, that’s important.

The only way for FindLaw‘s clients to preserve their reputations appears to be to ship out, because it doesn’t appear that FindLaw will shape up.

 

January 4th, 2010

Are FindLaw’s "Blogs" Tainting Its Clients, Commentators and the Profession of Law?

J’accuse.

In looking at FindLaw’s new gaggle of so-called “blogs” that are little more than crappy search engine fodder and client solicitations, I struggled to find the right word to describe them. The ramifications of these crap-blogs are important, because FindLaw is now tainting their clients, diminishing the stature of their vaunted professor-commentators, and lowering the level of discourse in the legal profession as a whole. And because this is likely to be a source of discussion going forward, it also means these so-called “blogs” need an appropriate name.

Just as the two-week holiday started, I noted that FindLaw ripped-off the name of my blog, recently creating their own New York Personal Injury Law Blog. (Link coded as “nofollow” to avoid giving Google juice). But the problem, as noted by others, isn’t just that they ripped off my name, but that they did so with unadulterated dreck. That was one of many new, similar sites that they created.

To be clear, dreck-bloggers aren’t interested in creating good content, they simply regurgitate local accident or arrest stories and place a call-to-action link at the bottom. Posts are filled with buzzwords to game Google that, if coupled with the call-to-action for a recent event, places them firmly in the camp of Solicitation 2.0, a subject I dealt with two years ago. Put bluntly, many of these dung-blogs are electronically soliciting clients. E-chasing, for lack of a better word.

In this posting, for example, FindLaw re-writes the story of a local accident that killed four and injured two, and in just the third sentence its author spits out:

If speed was the factor that caused this collision, then the families of the victims (and the surviving victims themselves) could hire a New York injury attorney to sue the person responsible.

The author made sure to name each of the deceased, provided two separate links back to the list of lawyers that pay FindLaw, and included a call-to-action. (If you have suffered a personal injury…blah, blah, blah.) There is, of course, no natural audience for such a “blog.” The postings do not allow for comments, nor is there any attempt at creativity or analysis.

An example of how FindLaw prostitutes itself to the alter of Google — FindLaw’s prior reputation and quality writing in its Writ commentary be damned — is in the “about” section. They place 97 words in two sentences of which a remarkable 37 are keywords, to come up with this contorted piece of SEO “writing”:

The New York Personal Injury Law Blog covers news and developments in the area of personal injury and tort law in New York state, and New York City specifically, and helps to connect people with New York injury lawyers. The New York Personal Injury Law Blog is intended to serve as a resource for people working through a personal injury issue in New York, or those who are interested in New York personal injury and tort law generally, including New York personal injury attorneys who wish to keep up with the latest news developments.

[Note: I wrote about the problem of keyword clutter previously in I Hate My Website.]

As Scott Greenfield puts it at FindLaw Plays Dirty (where he warns others of FindLaw stealing their well-known blog names):

These aren’t blogs, of course, in the sense that we understand them. There are mere names designed to trade in on search engine keywords, and capitalize on Findlaw’s SEO ability to get their scam blogs higher than yours on the search engine’s first page.

And as Sheryl Sisk puts it in Findlaw vs. NY Personal Injury Law Blog: The Opening Salvo:

Let’s be clear. This isn’t a case of innocently or mistakenly adopting a geocentric keyword-rich blog name. Findlaw’s not staffed by idiots. They knew what they were doing.

What are the consequences of FindLaw‘s folly in creating such sites? 1) it demeans the lawyers that paid them for listings, who are now associated with the scat-blog; 2) it diminishes the work of the professor-commentators at Writ that they currently use; and 3) it brings down the legal profession as a whole by legitimizing such conduct. Let’s take these one at a time:

First, it demeans the people that hired this once-prominent company to market for them. Marc Randazza, on seeing Findlaw’s mierda-blogs, wrote in Findlaw, are you really that douchetastic?:

They hired a milquetoast writer to author a milquetoast blawg for the sole purpose of selling ad space to sh*tty lawyers who can’t develop a reputation on their own.

Ouch. Now I happen to personally know some of those lawyers on the FindLaw list, and know that they are fine lawyers. I’m sure they had no idea that FindLaw would associate garbage with their names when they hired the company as their agents.

But you know what? Others don’t know that. And by creating a turd-blog and associating it with those lawyers, potential clients will come to the exact same conclusion as Randazza. And they will believe that those otherwise reputable lawyers agreed to be part of this ugliness.

And Randazza has more (he always does):

Here’s a rule of thumb… if a blog post ends with “for more information, contact the lawyers at Douchestein and Dickwadbaum,” then it is an advertisement, but, it isn’t advertising the lawyer’s services. It is advertising that lawyer’s stupidity, desperateness, and cluelessness. I would advise any potential client who sees a “blog” that ends its posts that way to turn around, run away, fast as you can, and do not look over your shoulder.

To the lawyers that paid money to FindLaw: You’ve just been sucker-punched. You outsourced your marketing to FindLaw and this is what they created for people to find you. Worse still, some of FindLaw‘s posts may qualify as electronic ambulance chasing. We’re talking serious ethical issues here with e-chasing, and I wonder who the lucky lawyer will be that becomes the test case. When you outsource your marketing you outsource your ethics.

Second in line to get clobbered are the professor-commentators on its roster, such as Anthony Sebok, Marci Hamilton, Michael Dorf, Carl Tobias, Sherry Colb, Joanna Grossman, Neil Buchanan, and Julie Hilden, to name a few.

All of their work on FindLaw‘s Writ has now been instantly devalued and diminished by being associated with the BS-blogs that FindLaw created. Once upon a time it was a feather in the cap to be published by West’s FindLaw. Not any more. Do they care?

The professor-commentators now stand side-by-side with Emily Grube — the author who appears at several of the sites despite the fact they vary both by practice area and jurisdiction– whose bio says she is a “writing specialist” with “experience correcting papers created by freshmen to graduate students.”

Perhaps it’s understandable that FindLaw couldn’t hire more lawyers to write about the law, given this tight job market with firms now at capacity, actively recruiting and unemployed attorneys so difficult to find. It’s not required that a law blogger be a lawyer of course, as Walter Olson of Overlawyered and Point of Law demonstrates, but it just makes it a lot easier to recognize and discuss relevant legal issues.

It’s worth noting that many others stood up and took notice of FindLaw’s ugly conduct — during a holiday week, no less — including: FloridaLegal, Molly McDonough (ABAJournal), BlawgWhisperer (ABAJournal), Ron Coleman, Kevin O’Keefe, Nicole Black, Don Cruse; Lawrence Koplow; Tim Hughes; Copeland Casati; Ryan Daniels; Lydia Bednerik; Kevin Underhill; Gerry Oginiski; A Reasonable Suspicion; and Roy Mura. Some of those folks, also happen to have prominent blogs that FindLaw might rip-off next.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly for the legal profession as a whole, FindLaw may have taken a smallish problem with a haphazard smattering of phony “blogs” that have popped up over the years, and given them (and newcomers) cover to act in the same unprofessional manner. Instead of raising the bar of discourse for lawyers they have lowered it. For if one of the pre-eminent names in the legal field thinks it’s OK to create a farkakte-blog (and you may have to hit that link unless you know a smattering of Yiddish), what message does that send to other lawyers? To the public? Is FindLaw now so desperate for business, so fearful of Martindale-Hubbell, Avvo and Google Scholar, that they are willing to race down to the muck and tarnish us all?

Greenfield wrote that:

For those of you who have placed their reputation in Findlaw’s hands, be prepared to be tainted by the company you keep.

But I think it is actually worse than that. While such dirt-blogs were previously confined to desperate lawyers here and there, FindLaw now opens the floodgates sewergates for lawyers to create slime for the web, for if it’s good enough for the once-vaunted Thomson West, it’s good enough for them.

Now if I could only find a good word to describe FindLaw’s number-two-blogs and their ilk. I know there’s a good one out there someplace. When others find that word, I’m sure it will hit the fan.

 

December 16th, 2009

Martindale-Hubbell Fires Spam Company; Explains Comment Spam Episode; Problems Remain (Updated)


Martindale-Hubbell previously reported that it suspended a company that sent comment spam to blogs, of which mine was one. They also offered a full accounting of the episode.

Today they confirm that the spammer has not just been suspended, but that they “have subsequently stopped working with them.” At my invitation, they have now given an accounting of the incident.

What follows is an email from Derek Benton, Director of International Operations at Martindale Hubbell International on the subject. My comments follow his email:
—————————–

“In late September, the UK Martindale-Hubbell team hired an agency to help us drive traffic back up on our co.uk. site. SEO was a core component of this program as a new directory structure for the site had caused significant issues with our organic rankings. It was our understanding that we would get to approve everything the agency did on our behalf, however unfortunately in this instance that did not take place. The agency we worked with, or an agent acting on their behalf, unfortunately posted some garbage comments without our knowledge.

We do not condone spamming under any circumstances, and once we discovered that these generic posts had gone out we immediately instructed the agency to halt all work on our behalf, and have subsequently stopped working with them. As we mentioned, we have also requested that the agency provide us with a list of all blogs affected so that they can be contacted individually.

Bottom line: we take this as seriously as you do. There’s absolutely NO long term benefit to us from spamming sites. One way or another it’s going to fail you in the end. We’re here for the long haul, and are fully aware that there are no legitimate short cuts. We’ve learnt an important (and somewhat painful) lesson about working with 3rd parties, but we’re confident that it’s one that will help us in the long run, even if it stings a little right now.”
—————————–

There are two interesting things about this episode. First, that Martindale-Hubbell says it is common practice to outsource attorney marketing to others, and second, that MH seems frantic after having been knocked off its #1 perch by upstart Avvo.com.

First to the outsourcing: In the Q&A that I did with Benton was this exchange about outsourcing their own work to British company called Conscious:

ET: After MH outsourced to Gilroy’s company [Conscious], did Gilroy outsource it elsewhere?

DB: Yes he did. Outsourcing is a common practice to help reduce labour costs.

As I’ve intoned before, attorney ethics and marketing are deeply connected. So when marketing gets outsourced, so do ethics. But the acknowledgement by MH that it is “common practice” for the attorney search services to, in turn, subcontract out the marketing they were hired to do, means that attorneys hiring a marketing company essentially run the “common” risk of their ethics being outsourced to low-cost mystery marketers.

Is that where you want your ethics to go, to the lowest bidder in the SEO marketing world? Because that appears to me to be part of the “common practice.”

It’s also worth noting that the “experts” in the attorney marketing world include disbarred or inexperienced attorneys.

Who, exactly, can you trust, when even the largest of attorney search companies feels it’s OK to send your ethics to the low bidder?

The second thing worth noting is the desperation of MH to reclaim its top spot in the attorney search arena as they worry about becoming an endangered species. Because there are beaucoup bucks to be mined from people that will — notwithstanding the risks of outsourcing their ethics to strangers hired on the cheap — ask others to advertise for them without understanding the ramifications.

If you hadn’t noticed, Avvo appears to have surpassed MH’s lawyers.com in the number of unique visitors they get each month. One of those two companies isn’t happy about that.

Of course, if you look at Avvo’s site, you’ll see that it is missing the “attorney advertising” mark that New York says is mandatory for attorney web sites.

It’s like the wild west out there.
——————-
Addendum 12/18/09 from Denton via email:

Eric – Thank you for giving us the opportunity to tell our side of the story. Unfortunately, in your accompanying commentary you asserted that “Martindale-Hubbell says it is common practice to outsource attorney marketing to others.” That is not at all what we’ve said or done. The agency we hired was engaged to provide SEO services to our co.uk. site — not to fulfill any marketing services for lawyers.

My response: SEO and attorney marketing are interrelated.

Links to this post:

8 Predictions for Lawyers in 2010  
As we look forward into 2010, I see the pace of change for the legal world accelerating driven by the economy, technological improvements and lawyers becoming more entrepreneurial in response. My list below may sound very self-serving, …
posted by Conrad Saam, Sr. Marketing Manager @ January 04, 2010 2:55 PM

 

November 16th, 2009

Outsourcing Marketing = Outsourcing Ethics (5 Problems With Outsourcing Attorney Marketing)


Five months back there was a Metro train crash in Washington DC, and I watched from a distance to see who/how/where/when the web would be used by lawyers to find victims. And one of the things we saw was that one of the gazillion attorney search firms that infect the web was soliciting clients. Given that these search firms are agents of the lawyers, that raised the problem of attorneys using the web to solicit.

Thus was born this little formula in June: outsourcing marketing = outsourcing ethics. This wasn’t, by any means, the first time I’d appreciated the problem of outsourcing marketing, having written about the ethics of attorney search services two years ago:

The implications of attorneys outsourcing advertising to a third party that may be acting unethically represents an area of law that is unexplored by many ethics committees.

The implications of being the test case are not pretty, and there after now five lawyers in Connecticut feeling the heat, as the state tries to decide if they violated local ethics laws by paying referral fees to the non-attorneys at a site called TotalBankruptcy.com. Some of the discussion goes to differentiating between a mere advertisement like a Google ad, and a “referral” from a search site after it takes in information from the consumer and then spits out a name.

For more on that, you can read Carolyn Elefant (in defense of the five), Scott Greenfield (calling the search service a cancer in the legal profession), Mark Bennett (suggesting disbarment, not saving), Josh King (the rules are unconstitutional), Larry Bodine (looking at the attorney who filed such complaints in 47 states) with both Bob Ambrogi and Colin Samuals doing extensive analysis of all the commentary.

It sucks to be a test case. It’s one of those things lawyers should aspire to avoid.

It wasn’t my intention to coin a phrase regarding this kind of stuff six months ago when I wrote about the train accident and the solicitation, but several others have now picked up that theme so it’s worth expanding on.

When lawyers outsource their marketing to others — be it a “search engine optimization” company, an attorney search company, or some hybrid — they are hiring agents to do their advertising. Agents. We learned about that stuff in law school. The concept has a long and deep legal history. The web didn’t make it go away.

And when it comes to the web, these are five things that those agents might be doing in your name that can get you in big trouble on the web, because attorney ethics are deeply intertwined now with marketing:

  • You are accused of sharing legal fees with non-lawyers (See Connecticut Five, above).
  • They could scrape content from other blogs (or news sources) and post it as yours, thereby violating copyright laws in your name,

It’s interesting to note that simply going out and hiring a high-profile marketing company won’t necessarily help you. For instance, Avvo is one of those find-a-lawyer sites, that also has reviews of attorneys. They’ve made a big splash and are as tech-savvy as anyone. Yet, if you go to their site, which now looks for attorneys to pay $49.95/month for “enhanced” visibility, you will find that they appear to violate one of New York’s ethics rules that went into effect in 2007.

Which rule does Avvo appear to break? The requirement that “attorney advertising” be placed on their home page, a failure that I noted hit many firms at the time it was implemented. Does an attorney search site need to have that mark on it? I would think so, as they are acting as the agents of the lawyers that hired them.

So what’s the downside to all this? Well, the lawyers that hire others to do their marketing might find that company violating copyright law (content scraping) or ethics rules and subject them to litigation and sanctions. This can be long and expensive.

But it’s actually a lot worse than that because litigation takes time and money and many don’t want to do it unless they absolutely have to.

Blogging, however, takes very little time and very little money. And if you piss off just one blogger with ethically and legally dubious behavior, s/he might write about you. And put your name in the headlines. And that blogger might have some readers who are also bloggers….And the effect is felt as soon as Google happens to index those blogs; which is to say if they are active bloggers, immediately. When potential clients Google you, the results can be painful.

Litigation can be so passé.
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The list of blogs that have agreed to expose the lawyers that engage in comment spam has been moved to this link: New Spam Comment Policy for Law Firms (You Will Be Exposed)

Links to this post:

I’ll Take Turkewitz on Ethics Over Jack Marshall Any Day of the Week
Over at his sparsely populated and impossible to navigate blog Ethics Alarm, American University Washington College of Law adjunct ethics professor Jack Marshall accuses wildly popular New York Personal Injury Law Attorney Law blogger …

posted by Carolyn Elefant @ April 05, 2010 12:36 PM

This Seattle DUI lawyer is not a douchebag
Remember that stupid post I wrote about some article on some site that suggested that defendants were better off with private lawyers (a particular private lawyer, actually) than public defenders because pd’s are …

posted by Gideon @ December 16, 2009 8:28 PM

Martindale-Hubbell now spamming lawyers’ blogs? Are lawyers to blame?
A marketing company doing work on behalf of the legal directory Martindale-Hubbell has acknowledged spamming the comment field on New York Attorney Eric Turkewitz’ blog. Turkewitz blogged about the Martindale spamming. …

posted by [email protected] (Kevin) @ December 01, 2009 11:24 AM

Martindale-Hubbell now spamming lawyers’ blogs? Are lawyers to blame?
A marketing company doing work on behalf of the legal directory Martindale-Hubbell has acknowledged spamming the comment field on New York Attorney Eric Turkewitz’ blog. Turkewitz blogged about the Martindale spamming. …

posted by [email protected] (Kevin) @ December 01, 2009 11:24 AM

Sixteen Rules for Lawyers Who (Think They) Want to Market Online
1. If you’re looking for The Promised Land, you’re in the wrong place. This is the Wild West, Pilgrim. 2. There are clients online—sophisticated, moneyed clients—but they don’t find lawyers the way you think they do. …
posted by Mark Bennett @ November 16, 2009 10:15 PM

 

September 23rd, 2009

More Arrests In Insurance Fraud Ring


Seven workers from New York City hospitals and one lawyer were arrested today in a continuing probe by AG Andrew Cuomo regarding the sale of patient information.

The workers all came from city-owned hospitals in the Bronx; six from Lincoln Hospital and one from Jacobi. The lawyer comes from Dinkes & Schwitzer, a Manhattan firm that handles personal injury and medical malpractice matters.

I had covered this probe previously, along with similar matters, here:

Ambulance Chasers, Runners and Other Creeps (August 3, 2009)

Whether these individuals are guilty of the charges against them remains to be seen. If they are not, they should have their names cleared. But if they are, I’d like to see a very long stay at the gray bar hotel.