Online Reputation Management With Lawyers

Understanding Lawyers

 

“Lawyers are like rhinoceroses: thick skinned, short-sighted, and always ready to charge”

                                                David Mellor, barrister and former British politician

 

 

 

Lawyers are experts in the law, not in online strategies and online human behavior – which is exactly where you need to begin. Only in a very few cases will legal action be the right “singular” choice to follow. We have seen some over the years. We have seem them work, we have seen them flop, but the most important thing I need the reader to know is that we have seen them backfire. In some cases, pursuing a legal solution and getting your lawyers involved will only make things worse. A flat fee to solve your problem in a relatively short period of time but it carries with it a certain risk premium.

 

There is insurance for a reason; to be covered for the worse outcome. The reverse is true here; some people in my industry will go as far as to say: “hire a lawyer as a last resort:. I am not of that opinion either. As I said in the opening chapter, I believe it’s best to hire both parties to work together. This is challenging because the lawyer’s first instinct will be to ask you to trust them fully and “not waste money” on reputation firms. This is because they see the law as the only solution for your reputation problems, and needless to say; they would prefer to see the legal community process the work. Billing dollars are at stake and the dominion of reputation management are often claimed for lawyers to handle. If that were traditionally true, the domain of litigation PR, crisis communication, and data breach communication, to name a few, would never exist.

 

Anyone who has spent even five minutes researching Ripoff Report’s legal background knows the standard response – despite many lawsuits against it, Ripoff Report has never lost a case.  It has never lost because courts have consistently determined that Ed and the Ripoff Report are not legally responsible for the accuracy of statements posted by users of the site.  That’s just the law.

More damage have been done by lawyers on the whole in ORM cases then good, but we have seen several instances where lawyers were also an integral part of the ORM strategy.

Lawyers are especially useful in situations where a publishing business cannot fight for their first amendment rights because of financial constraints. In fact, many publications find that they have reached that point, including ED from ROR who has reportedly put the site for sale. At some point, revenue from ads is not a sufficient model to be the target of many lawsuits.

We have seen scenarios where the publisher will for financial and pragmatic reasons remove, at least, an online version of an article that was hurting out client. But this strategy must be handled with care and not with the typical rhino charge that can create a counter movement and larger problem.

 

There is a famous social media marketing case related to this issue we have highlighted in this earlier post. Lawyers can and do cause PR issues and even PR crisis.