Legal Websites with Comments – Strike Back at Critical Client? What are these Sites? Fake a Review?

Social Media is a Tool, You are a Lawyer, Don’t be the Fool

So a lawyer in the Chicago area Betty Tsamis, is active with AVVO, a lawyer rating site.  Her AVVO page is here. She has a 6.2 rating, pretty good.  Tsamis handled a case for a client, Rinehart and appealed his denial of Unemployment Benefits case against American Airlines, and the case did not go well, which happens.  Whose fault?  It depends on who you believe.  Client wrote an unfavorable review and said that he paid her fee, which she took “knowing full well” he would lose the case.

The trouble for the lawyer came about when Tsamis replied with facts and information that she got during the confidential client communications. The details are here. She stated in the reply to his review that he had beaten up a woman co-worker, and not advised her of that before she filed the appeal. (If you beat up co-workers, you usually do not get UE coverage).  The IL disciplinary office has filed charges for breaching Rule 1.6 of the RPC.  Tsamis still posts replies to critical comments, but they are now toned down.

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The Ratings Game – Martindale Hubbell to AVVO to Super Lawyer to Yelp, and beyond.

Lawyer ratings were once the sacred province of now absorbed publisher Martindale-Hubbell. Today there are several lawyer and law firm ratings sites,  Avvo (above) offers ratings on lawyers and other professionals. [full disclosure, my AVVO rating linked here]  AVVO seems the most aggressive of the new generation.  MH did the same kind of ratings, but in the old days, the rating was bound in a series of books taking up 5-6 feet of library shelf space and costing hundreds of dollars and updated yearly, but MH is now is found online at http://www.martindale.com {my martindale.com rating is here].  AVVO allows client comments, as does Martindale. Both sites focus on lawyers and other professionals.

Another new entrant in the legal and medical fields does it differently. SuperLawyers.com names what it calls the “super lawyers” in most of the states. It works with magazine publishers and sends out ad-filled supplements annually on lawyers nominated and selected as the best.  [full disclosure – I am told I have been nominated, but I have not been selected as a super lawyer (or as a colleague calls them “the superest duperest lawyers”) in Indiana]. There are several ethics opinions on the propriety of advertising the designation. Most states seem to have lost interest in prosecuting this issue, even though there are regulations on lawyer advertising.

Yelp offers webpages for most businesses in the country, in an online “yellow page” style that gives the business name, address, phone number, and then lets customers comment on every business in town, from spas to restaurants and lawyers. The business owner can claim the page and edit the information about the business.

Breach of Yelp’s Policy

San Francisco lawyer Julian McMillan stands accused of taking the review matter just a step further, by allegedly having his staff create and post favorable reviews.  Favorable reviews are hard to come by, and may have a positive economic benefit to the lawyer praised. As Ms. Tsamis can attest, unfavorable reviews may have more impact.

So Yelp claims that it monitors and prosecutes businesses and now lawyers who abuse the comments policy. It should be noted that McMillan responds that he had sued Yelp and won in the trial court on an advertising contract dispute.  He suggests this is payback by Yelp.

We will see how this comes out over the next few months.

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Ernie the Attorney’s take on these matters!

The leading blogger in the legal field, Ernie the Attorney and I were discussing the “dangerous tool” of social media last week.  I do not agree with ethics guru Stephen Gillers, that all lawyers should avoid social media, and who Ernie takes apart in this post (else I would not be posting here).

Any tool can be dangerous.  Lawyers get trained  to look out for danger in every area of life. I advocate removing dangerous tools from idiots and infants, who are found in lots of places.

I hope there are few idiots and no infants among the lawyers who are posting on any of the social media sites. But still be careful out there, and learn how to run spell checker on the site.

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Accusing the Accuser: Staff Gone Wild: Ethics of Using ABA Ethics Opinions

What to do when the accuser is accused?

Occasionally the staff of the Disciplinary Commission is accused of committing wrongdoing. Much like a prosecutor  accused of malfeasance, there needs to be a method of resolving such an event, and recently the Indiana Supreme Court addressed this problem.

In the artfully titled Order which the court called:  ORDER FORMALIZING POLICY AND SETTING PROCEDURE FOR THE INVESTIGATION AND PROSECUTION OF GRIEVANCES INVOLVING MEMBERS AND STAFF OF THE INDIANA SUPREME COURT DISCIPLINARY COMMISSION AND ATTORNEYS SERVING AS HEARING OFFICERS IN ATTORNEY DISCIPLINE CASES, the court addressed the issue of the accuser getting accused.  How should it be handled, and what to make of the event.The informal policy needed to be made a formal policy, so grievants would know what to expect. Five pages of analysis and remedy that is in the ranks of the better writings of this Court (notwithstanding the gender bias of referring to the then current and future CJs as “he”).  Well worth your time reading if you have a concern about the impartiality of the staff of the Disciplinary Commission. There is a way to get a fair proceeding.

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Staff Gone Wild – Signing Everything

There will be an interesting ethics program at the 2013 Solo and Small Firm Conference on the Ethics For Law Firm Staff, presented by John Conlon and your blogger, Ted Waggoner.  It was not prompted by, but will address the issues raised in the third Chovanec Opinion.  Oops.  Lack of training and supervision of staff, bad documents, that a secretary signed with the lawyer’s name to were filed with the US Bankruptcy Court.  The court rejected the documents, and things got bad for the lawyer, again.

Those federal judges don’t take things like this lightly. The Supremes did not either when it got to them. Read the case, and meet with your staff.

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How Ethical is Using an Ethics Opinion of the ABA?

So the ABA, a not for profit professional association with nearly a million members, creates at considerable expense, a Center for Professional Responsibility, with staff, office space, and all the accoutrements of support for the profession.  It is a dues charging Center, which members of the ABA can, for a fee, join and get the benefits of the Center.  It publishes books on ethical issues, works on the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct, and produces the official ABA Ethics Opinions based on those Model Rules.

One of the country’s more prominent lawyers, Ernie Svenson, a recent speaker at the ISBA Solo & Small Firm Conference, provided a link on his website, (I hope it is a profit center to his firm) to an ABA opinion on metadata, and for his effort got a cease and desist letter.  He posts about it and gets a serious conversation going about why the ABA would expect to sell its ethics opinions.

Classmate Joe O’Connor, a state delegate to the ABA House replied:

As the ABA State Delegate, and as a person who like a number of our Indiana colleagues has spent considerable volunteer time working with other lawyers from around the country to keep the ABA vital and relevant to our profession and safeguarding the justice system, I wanted to respond briefly to a couple of posts on this list serve about ABA ethics opinions and resources.

 Since October 2010, the ABA has made its ethics opinions available to the public free of charge by posting them on the website of the ABA Center for Professional Responsibility.  The ABA policy on access to and use of ethics opinions is reasonable and allows individuals to link to ABA ethics opinions and to quote from them within the doctrine of fair use.  The ABA ethics opinions policy, which is titled “ABA Ethics Opinions: Access for All Lawyers,” can be found on abanow.org at the URL: 

 http://www.abanow.org/2010/10/american-bar-association-ethics-opinions/.  

 I believe this represents a well-reasoned policy to provide guidance to all members of the profession and the public but of course opinions can differ.

 Joe O’Connor

I agree that an ethics opinion has some extrinsic value, and if the user needs to use more than “fair use” as defined in the copyright laws, a commercial transaction, including a payment for the product should be made.  I disagree with many about the value of an ABA opinion, which is based on the Model Rules, and not on the rule as actually written and enforced by the various state supreme courts. It is not a government document.

The Indiana State Bar Association does not charge for its opinions, now. They are available on the website. Not well indexed, but if you have the time, the opinion is there.

Some argue that this is one more reason to not join the ABA, but there are plenty of reasons for that, from politics to cheapness or lack or professional self-esteem. A complaint that a product that a seller wants $20 (or whatever) for is not worth  $20 is not the same as the complaint that they should not be permitted to sell the product.

ABA ought to win, and delegates ought to value the product of the organization they represent.