What to Do When You’re Lawyer Marketing is Damaged by Online Reviews

After spending countless hours creating an attractive website, setting up Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook accounts, and creating profiles on online legal websites, you may feel as though you have done everything you can to maximize your law firm web marketing. Unfortunately, all of that hard work can be undone with just one negative posting placed on the Internet. Perhaps you had a dispute with a former client over a bill. Regardless of the cause, when people write negative reviews or posts and make them public, the result can be devastating for your law firm.
What can you do if this happens to your firm? Unfortunately, existing laws are not very effective at combatting this type of behavior. Further, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act usually does not allow law firms to hold Internet service providers responsible for the actions of its users.
Fortunately, there are other steps that can be taken outside of criminal prosecution. However, it is also important to remember that retaliation may not always be the best policy for lawyers. The following is a list of options available to attorneys whose legal marketing campaign has been damaged:

• File and prosecute a defamation or libel lawsuit
• Engage in negotiations with the website on which the defamatory content appears
• Utilize forensic computer techniques to track and locate the offenders
• Send a letter notifying the individual that his or her postings constitute libel, and request that they stop
• Engage in a dilution campaign
• Ignore the content and hope that it fades from Google search results

Online content can both help and hurt lawyer marketing. The better the content on the blog, the more success the blog will bring. For more information, contact the legal marketing experts at Great Legal Marketing at 703-591-9829.