Bad Client Review on Avvo or Whatever? Think Twice Before Responding

Here in Georgia they just affirmed disciplinary action against a lawyer who, among other things, revealed client confidences in responding to a client’s negative review on an Internet site.  The case is here.  There are quite a few of those.

I may have mentioned this before, but one thing that some lawyers are doing is:  having clients, on intake, assign copyright to any reviews to the lawyer; then, if a negative review is posted, they send a take-down notice to the site.  Voila.

Welcome to the 21st Century.

Update:  Professor Eric Goldman responded to an email I’d sent out to a bunch of IP Professors with the following, which he allowed me to share:

 

The SF Bar Association also issued an ethics opinion on lawyers responding to client reviews. http://www.sfbar.org/ethics/opinion_2014-1.aspx

Building on my work with Jason and the Berkeley students, I wrote a short article on how doctors should respond to patient reviews: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericgoldman/2013/11/21/how-doctors-should-respond-to-negative-online-reviews/ Much of that discussion is extensible to client reviews of lawyers.
It would be highly inadvisable for lawyers to try the Medical Justice copyright-assignment-in-unwritten-reviews hack. The request basically sets up a conflict between the lawyer and the client at the relationship’s outset. After all, almost any independent lawyer would not advise the client to sign such an assignment.
There are also likely to be statutes limiting businesses’ ability to contractually restrict their customers’ reviews. California is currently considering AB2365 requiring any such restriction to be “knowing, voluntary and intelligent.” See my discussion about the bill (and its limitations) http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericgoldman/2014/04/30/california-moving-to-protect-consumer-reviews/ It would not surprise me if there’s a federal bill on this topic as well.
Eric.

Eric Goldman
Professor, Santa Clara University School of Law
Director, High Tech Law Institute
Email: egoldman@gmail.com
Personal website: http://www.ericgoldman.org
Blogs: http://blog.ericgoldman.org ** http://blogs.forbes.com/ericgoldman/ ** http://blog.ericgoldman.org/personal/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/ericgoldman

 

About David

Professor of Law, Mercer University School of Law. Formerly Of Counsel, Taylor English Duma, LLP and in 2012-13, judicial clerk to Chief Judge Rader.

2 thoughts on “Bad Client Review on Avvo or Whatever? Think Twice Before Responding

  1. 2

    The best defense for a patent attorney against potential negative reviews is to screen your clients very carefully in the first place. If there are any red flags then simply decline representation. Red flags can be, a client who requests his patent attorney to sign an NDA, an inventor who claims he has a “million dollar idea” (he will surely look for someone to blame if the millions don’t roll in), an inventor who doesn’t seem to understand that there are no guarantees to getting a patent or good coverage. Some firms won’t even represent small/non-sophisticated clients, but I personally don’t think this is right.

  2. 1

    I was thinking along the same lines as EG and inherent conflict with full disclosure requirements raising all types of problems with the “just assign your future quibbles over to me.”

    Law is not an easy business to be in, given that any hotly (read as emotion-laden) contested issue that does go to court because the parties cannot work things out will always end in in at least (sometime more and a lot more if no one is happy with a split baby type result) 50% of the parties not getting what they fervently believed in.

    I was talking to an old professor of mine that teaches law for lawyers (ethics) about the disconnect between the rather low success rate of clients complaining about “bad lawyers” (when what they are mostly complaining about are “bad” results that just don’t go their way) and the seemingly perpetual negative view of lawyers overall.

    The bar (IMHO) does not do an effective enough job in its public relations to draw the distinction between “bad” results (inevitable) and “bad lawyers.” A difficult aim to be sure (the message of “hey, even if you pay us buku bucks the best you should expect is a crapshoot” is not all that enticing to get people to pay buku bucks).

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