Posted on
January 6, 2010 in
Mitchell Sassower is doing it. Marc J. Chase is doing it. Myron Kahn is doing it. Many others are doing it too, but those three are at the top of the list.
What are they doing?
They’re funding FindLaw’s crappy little rip-off (all above links are nofollow) of the name of Eric Turkewitz’s excellent New York Personal Injury Law Blog.
I started writing this post back before Christmas, but I found that I really didn’t have anything to add to what Eric and Scott Greenfield and Marc Randazza and Sheryl Sisk said about it; now I do.
What has changed in two weeks? It’s not that FindLaw’s feculent phony blogs (produced by self-styled “writing specialist” Emily Grube) are dreck, regurgitating local accident and arrest stories and placing a call-to-action link at the bottom. While that is appropriately offensive, it’s about what I would expect from a company like FindLaw.
No, it’s that two weeks have passed and guys like Mitchell Sassower, Marc Chase, and Myron Kahn (whatever kind of guys those are) still have their names attached to FindLaw’s dreckbloggen.
Where does the buck stop? It is not complicated. FindLaw does sleazy things (like publish a dreckblog using the name of Turkewitz’s blog) not for love or even for clicks. It does those things because people are paying it to. FindLaw will stop its sordid practices when the people who throw money at FindLaw stop doing so because of those practices, and not before.
It was Turkewitz who coined the formula, Outsourcing Marketing = Outsourcing Ethics. This is no less true when you outsource your marketing to FindLaw than when you outsource it to Ashish’s Cut-Rate SEO Services. Its corollary is OM=OR. Outsourcing Marketing = Outsourcing Reputation. When Mitchell Sassower, Marc Chase, and Myron Kahn decided that they would let FindLaw market their firms, they handed their reputations over to that company—a company willing to rip off the name of the well-established and respected blog of one of their colleagues and to spew filth for a few clicks.
The only people who can make FindLaw stop are FindLaw’s customers, and most of them are not going to do anything about it until they realize that it’s blowing back on them.
Nu, Markele, you want I should give you a mazel tov on the bissel of Yiddish you used to describe the chazerai they’re trying to pass off as blogs? These gonifs and their spiel are enough to drive you meshuga.
I’m glad to see you take a tilt at FindLaw. I’ve found that they were very successful at selling a lot of overpriced services to lawyers in the late 90’s/early 00’s. For example, $650/month for hosting of a cookie-cutter website and listing in their directory (which by my calculations, is probably good for one or two clients a year – maybe). These lawyers are ignorant about and intimidated by the internet and having someone with “law” in their name, puts them at ease, especially since they are under the umbrella of West/Thompson. Many of those lawyers are not active on the web and only have a presence because they know that they should have some sort of presence out there. Most of these folks would absolutely agree with the “outsourcing your marketing = outsourcing your reputation” mantra, if only they were aware of what was going on (or had some framework for understanding a copy cat, piggybacking, fakeass “blog”. Unfortunately, they are not going to get pulled into this until their marketers do something particular egregious, like the above.
[…] explain how it is okay to use a dead nine-year-old child to advertise legal services. Like Sassower, Chase, and Kahn (who are also invited to explain), Strand, Beck, Petersen, Hark, and Hilles are paying FindLaw to […]