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Online reputation management for lawyers
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This is the story of Mike Goodattorney (name changed), a good attorney who got some bad information posted about him online. If you care about your reputation, read on, because this story could be about you too.
For all of the positives that the internet brings to the practice of law, there is another side to online marketing that attorneys need to be aware of. The most common term is online reputation management, and it is fast becoming an indispensable service for lawyers and law firms.
Before we talk about the solution, let's look at the problem.
It's 2009. All but the dimmest of law firms have come to grips with the fact that a good online presence is not only a good practice enhancer, it is a necessity for those who want to continue to do business. If a person looking for legal services can't find any information about an attorney or firm on the internet (usually by doing a Google search), then more and more he or she moves on to a firm that has an internet presence.
Why? The internet lets people get to know their lawyer before they ever meet or talk on the phone. But what happens when the information they find about the lawyer or firm is negative? Worse, what happens when it is both negative and false?
Enter online reputation management.
A case study:
Oregon Attorney Mike Goodattorney is a member is good standing with the State Bar of Oregon. Mike Goodattorney has an outstanding reputation in the legal community, gets great results for his clients, and is genuinely a good person and lawyer.
However, there is a venomous and vindictive website that holds itself out as being affiliated with the Oregon Bar, even though there is no association. It invites people to complain about lawyers, and even instructs them about how to contact the press after they file a complaint. The site offers no method of disputing the claims, and there is no process by which attorneys can defend themselves and vindicate their names and reputations. There are many of these sites across the nation, and they are typically run by sleazy operators, including former attorneys.
The site that victimized Mike Goodattorney is run by a person who holds himself out as an attorney and former judge. Our investigation showed that the the owner of the website is currently a licensed attorney in California, and that he has gone on inactive status with the California Bar several times, including a suspension in the mid 1990's for failure to pay child support. It shows that he is not licensed to practice law by the Oregon State Bar, which apparently accused him of lying on his application in the 1990s. Although he has self-serving articles online billing himself as "one of the most ethical lawyers in California, Oregon and Washington State," our investigation also revealed that he is not licensed to practice law in Washington State.
For Mike Goodattorney, it is little consolation that the owner of this website is ethically questionable in his own right. When Mr. Goodattorney contacted him to ask him to remove the false and defamatory posting, the response he gave was that it was part of the public record.
So what's a good lawyer like Mike Goodattorney to do when faced with a situation like this?
Enter online reputation management.
The idea behind the service is simple. The goal is to bury false and defamatory information in the search engine results with factually accurate information.
How is it done? It's not easy in many cases. My personal theory of reputation management is simple. If you have enough good information out there, it will outweigh and overpower the false and the defamatory.
There are many companies that sell reputation management services. Some say that they will pull out all the stops and employ "black hat" tactics such as copying the webpage that they want buried, linking it with sites that the search engines don't trust and even hacking the site. In my opinion, companies that proclaim that they will do this should be avoided because a) it probably won't work very well; and b) they are probably trying to take advantage of a person who has already been victimized once.
Good attorney website marketing necessarily involves all the elements of online reputation management that I deem important, including:
1. Building good, ethical websites that educate the public about the attorney's area of practice;
2. Optimize pages for both usability and search indexing;
3. Create a strong and multi-tiered presence for the law firm (the major search engines typically will display no more than two results for any single URL), so that, especially with searches for the attorneys and firm name, good, accurate and relevant information dominates.
It's that simple. But simple isn't easy. And simple isn't cheap. And simple takes time.
But given the proper motivation, time and resources, the good information about an attorney or firm should triumph over the false and defamatory.
As George Harrison said, it's gonna take patience and time to do it right (not to mention money). The bright side to this is that there isn't a whole lot of money to be made defaming attorneys, so a motivated lawyer has a huge advantage over internet predators who peddle defamation to prop themselves up. There simply isn't enough time in the day or money to overcome a well run reputation management campaign.
For the Mike Goodattorney's of the world whose practices and hard-earned reputations are hurt by sleazy people, it is hard to live with the fact that every day lies are associated with their good name. The internet can be a whisper smear campaign on steroids. For those defamed online, the only solution is to be proactive and fight back. While litigation and injunctions may be a good second option, online reputation management is quicker, cheaper and probably more effective.
For consumers looking for a lawyer online, heed this warning. If you read a negative review first and decide not to call or hire the lawyer based on the review, consider the source. There are law firms out there that hire "marketers" to write and promote defamatory and untrue material about their competitors. By avoiding a lawyer just because of a negative online review, you may inadvertently fall into the hands of the very firm that propagated the false and negative information to begin with. Online, things are not always what they seem. Because of the vast amount of information out there, you will have to digest more information than ever to get to the truth.
About the author: Dan Jaffe is an attorney and the webmaster of duiattorney.com. He advises and helps other attorneys with online marketing strategy.
