More On Ghostblogging

Dear Mr. Bennett,

Thank you for including my company in your blog post yesterday about the ethics of legal ghostblogging.  As a (relatively) new form of communication, blogging is still in many ways going through its growing pains, and as more and more professionals and businesses begin to see the value of blogging I know that there will be many more debates about various aspects of it, including continuing ethical debates.  Like you, I think these debates are important, and I look forward to seeing (and perhaps being a part of) how the field evolves.

The ethics of having a ghostwriter in a field that is still in many ways expected to be transparent is something that I discuss with each and every one of my clients; that is why some of my clients choose to have my tagline at the bottom of each post that I write for them, and every client of mine knows that I expect them to read and approve every post that appears on their blog. Personal and professional responsibility is not something I neglect or take lightly.  As you might expect, I have many of my own opinions about this subject and would be happy to engage in conversation with you if you are interested in discussion.

The reason I am writing you today is because–although I have no desire to censor the debate–I would like to ask you, as a professional courtesy, to remove your reference and link to my client testimonials page.  You are welcome to leave your reference to my business and my home page (your readers can find my client testimonials page from there if they are so inclined.) As I said above, professional responsibility is not something I take lightly, and I feel it is my professional responsibility to be the “front man” in this debate, and bear the brunt of this particular criticism. I realize that in the end this is your forum and your decision, and I appreciate your consideration of my clients and of my request.

If you would like to discuss this topic further I invite you to e-mail me privately at any time.

Best Regards,
Jenni Buchanan

www.LegalGhostblogger.com
My blog: http://blogprofs.typepad.com/

Dear Ms. Buchanan:

Thank you for your email.

Blogging is not so novel that there are no precedents. In the original post I drew analogies to claiming other lawyers’ results and résumés; in the non-legal world it’s like putting a picture of one thing on the outside of a can filled with another. I note that, of the five “bloggers” with testimonials on your testimonial page, only two use your tagline; Gene Osofsky, Rick Law, and Kimberly T. Lee do not. Why do you suppose that is?

It is very important for the discussion of the ethics of lawyers using ghostbloggers to be conducted publicly, in full view of those who might be affected by lawyers’ marketing choices—not only the clients whose fortunes and futures might be at stake, but also the lawyers whose reputations are at stake. You take professional responsibility seriously, but your clients are the ones with their licenses and their reputations on the line.

It is crucial that those with ultimate legal and ethical responsibility for online marketing (the lawyers) realize that they have some skin in the game. Some lawyers feeling that it is okay to have a “front man” causes many of the problems with unethical online marketing: they trust a non-lawyer to do it for them, and wind up paying for spam, splogging, or ghostblogging. I suspect that when lawyers realize that they might be called to public account for the things they delegate to others (Outsourcing Marketing = Outsourcing Ethics), they give a lot more thought to their marketing choices.

I’d be happy to hear your arguments that hiring a legal ghostblogger is ethical, but I don’t think your clients should be insulated from the effects of this particular decision.

Mark

Rent-A-Brain With Ghostbloggers

Lawyers: want to juice your stats a little so that clients are more likely to hire you? Have we got a deal for you! GhostWins.com has a stable of excellent but self-effacing lawyers who are willing to let you take public credit for their results. Here’s how it works: you sign up for GhostWins.com, paying $250 per month for syndicated results (which other lawyers might also take credit for) or $500 per month for personalized results. Every week we’ll send you three or four actual successful outcomes in your field of law, which you can then publicize on your website or blog as your own successful outcomes. We all know how potential clients love lawyers who win; with GhostWins.com you create the appearance of being such a lawyer without putting in the many hours of hard work (not to mention good luck) required to win your own cases.

Do you look like John Edwards? No, I thought not. Yet everyone knows that success is tied to physical attractiveness. So you might be interested in GhostMug.com. GhostMug.com works on the same principles as GhostWins.com: you pay a small monthly fee, and we provide you with pictures of a trustworthy person who fits your basic demographics—just like you but much better looking. As long as you continue your subscription, you can continue using the pictures as a substitute for your own—let’s face it—homely mug in your online marketing. We’ll even send you weekly updates of “your” face in law-related poses. $250 a month gets you a syndicated face, which other subscribers might also use (we can’t guarantee that someone in your field of law and geographical area will not use the same face as you) or $500 a month gets you a personalized face, which only you will have permission to use.

Since you’re still reading this, odds are that you didn’t graduate from a Tier-One law school. You know that it doesn’t make any difference to the results you get (or lease, through GhostWins.com), but some paying clients might be more likely to hire you if your resume were a little more impressive. GhostResume.com can fix that problem. On the same model as GhostWins.com and GhostMug.com, GhostResume.com allows you to contract out your credentials. For a nominal fee, you get to use the guaranteed-to-impress bona fides of an actual lawyer in your marketing materials. Your clients will never know the difference.

To maximize your online marketing potential, sign up for TheWholeGhostPackage.com. You’ll get weekly GhostWins, a GhostMug, and a matching GhostResume for a discounted monthly $700 (syndicated) or $1,400 (personalized).

So how is it okay for a lawyer to hire a ghostwriter to write his blog?

When a client hires a lawyer, more than the results or the face or the résumé, he’s paying for the lawyer’s knowledge, intellect and heart—attributes that good writing reveals and ghostwriting falsifies. Hiring a ghostwriter to write your blog (like some of the people here using a ghostwriter “to enhance their credibility”) is no more ethical than subscribing to TheWholeGhostPackage.com.

Five Lawyers Trading on the Death of an Innocent

I invite the following lawyers:

The Law Offices of Eric Strand
West Chester, PA

Law Office of Henry S. Hilles, III
Norristown, PA

to 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 market them through dreckbloggen.

We didn’t know? You know now. What have you done about it?

We didn’t ask FindLaw to do this? Not explicitly, but you paid them to.

We trusted FindLaw?

Outsource your marketing, outsource your reputation.

New Blog Today

Avvo Pimp, about what I call answhores—lawyers like Alan Brinkmeier who answer questions on Avvo Answers without regard to whether those questions relate to their area of practice, their state, or even their knowledge.

Bloggers’ Best Cancelled for Lack of Interest

Thanks to South Carolina criminal defense lawyers Bobby Frederick and Johnny Gardner for participating.

We get the blogosphere we deserve.

What Avvo Answers Are Good For

I thought of a good use for Avvo’s questions today.

If you needed a regular source of ideas for blog posts, you could subscribe to Avvo’s questions in your field and answer them on the blog. Lots of the questions aren’t worth answering, but there are at least a couple a week that might make for interesting blog posts.

For example, here are today’s Texas criminal law questions from Avvo Answers:

• In Texas if someone steals and doesn’t get caught but someone wants to turn them in that saw what will happen?[Probably nothing.]
• I heard that the Minimum mandatory stay in Federal Prison was being reduced to 65%. Is that true, and when will that come in fo [No. It's a perennial myth.]
• When the prosecutor’s office receive new information that is exculpatory, what is their role? [To reveal it to the defense.]
• I need a pro bono criminal lawyer to handle a case for my 18 year old son, who is being set up. He is worried about not graduate[Good luck.]
• I took the blame for a friends theft of $230. Can I still get in trouble for ratting him out? [Probably.]

At least four out of those five questions might make for informative blog posts. No effort would be required to choose a topic for a post; all you would have to do is research and answer the question. Voilà, instant blog framework, leading to the production of on-subject content.

As a bonus, by answering on your own blog you don’t have to deal with the answhores.

I Think Barnum Underestimated

Kashonia spent AU$12,000 to travel from Australia to the U.S. to attend a workshop called Experience the Reality of Success. Then she got upset because of the presenter’s “total misrepresentation of his workshop. . . . In ‘reality’ we all experienced the reality of begging, not the promised reality of vibrational manifestation.“

Kashonia wants her money back. Because “whilst it’s true that we did start with nothing, what we did was to go out on the streets and beg for money. That was the way we were to “manifest” the money.  There is a BIG DIFFERENCE between vibrationally manifesting money and begging for money on the streets.” Yes, the rubes who had paid to go to this workshop were actually sent out onto the streets of Las Vegas to ask strangers for money.

Hmmm. You cause your vocal cords to vibrate and form the words, “please give me money”; a stranger gives you money. That sounds like vibrational manifestation of money to me.

But, hey, I live in the real world, where people work for a living. I’m not a mental health professional, so I can’t say for sure that she’s batshit insane/ Instead, I’ll just say that she is living in a different world. Kashonia’s long post reveals how clueless the greedy can be in their search for money for nothing. Her greed seems pretty benign—hapless rather than avaricious—but someone who spends 12 grand to learn how to “vibrationally manifest[] money”:

1. Is well-advised to always set off the word “reality” with doubt quotes;
2. Will always be an easy mark for a conman; and
3. Has no right to complain when someone else gets money from her for nothing.

Refuge for the Disbarred

See this exchange (very tall JPEG) between Miami bar defense lawyer Brian Tannebaum and real estate lawyer real estate law specialist Real Estate Law & Investment Specialist, Broker & Social Media Consultant; Deal Closer & innovator real-estate-law-investments-loss-mitigation-and-social-media-consulting something Kathleen A. Scanlon.

Brian’s target, it seems, pled guilty to mortgage fraud in state court in New York, and while awaiting sentencing and delinquent with the bar continued to “network” as a real estate lawyer on Twitter. When Brian inquired, she responded. There was some back-and-forth, and then she deleted her own replies to Brian and claimed not to have (“I don’t know why my replies are not showing up . . . what did I delete??? are you insane?” Then she changed her bio on Twitter—three times. (Tannebaum twitted, “I want to apologize to everyone for turning @kasesq94 into a “Social Media Consultant.”)

I sympathize with Scanlon, trying to make the best of the very bad situation she’s gotten herself into. She may well have a partner and employees (if you believe her website, she has a staff of beautiful people in expensive suits) who are depending on her to make a smooth transition to what she calls her “hiatus,” and a family depending on her to bring food home during that break.

I also understand the appeal of “Social Media Consultant.” It is a title that any idiot can give himself; it requires no sort of expertise whatsoever, and no equipment but a computer with an internet connection (which the former lawyer won’t be using to practice law). Barriers to entry in this specialty are very low. Scanlon will not be the first lawyer who, forced out of the practice of law, has redefined herself as a blog or other social media expert.

In fact, it follows from the basic premise of online marketing—that, as self-proclaimed expert Adrianos Facchetti writes, “You are what Google says you are”—that by merely marketing yourself online as an expert you become an expert qualified to take people’s money to tell them how to become experts by marketing themselves online as experts. It’s turtles all the way down.

So what’s wrong with that? If some naive lawyer, not having the first clue about online social media, wants to pay a convicted, disbarred, or otherwise disgraced ex-lawyer to show her the ropes, what harm is done?

None, if the naif knows what she is getting and the consultant doesn’t lead her to do anything untoward or deceptive. But when the disgraced lawyer is deliberately concealing the fact that he is a disgraced lawyer, these questions are raised: is the naif getting what she thinks she is getting (or is she trusting someone whom she would not trust if the truth were revealed); and will the consultant, for whom deception has worked, teach the naif to be open and honest (or will he teach her what worked for him: concealment and deception)?

I appreciate that it might be difficult for the social media expert to get hired if the world knows that he has been disbarred for raiding minors’ trust funds or convicted of mortgage fraud, and I believe strongly in redemption, but holding oneself out as something one is not seems to me an unlikely path to redemption.

So what did disgraced lawyers do before there was such a thing as a social media consultant?

The First Annual Bloggers’ Best Awards [Categories Added]

The ABA Journal’s popularity contest for the best law blogs in ten categories is a joke. It was a joke last year too, when my Defending People won “best” blog in the category of crime, and I treated it as such, tub-thumping for Scott Greenfield’s Simple Justice even as Scott electioneered for Defending People (that Defending People won is a testament to the power of Scott’s blog over mine).

In 2009, Simple Justice rightfully owns the category of “Criminal Justice.” Here, though, are the five latest posts from the frontrunner in that category, which is shamelessly begging for votes from its readers:

• Baucus Gave Girlfriend Raise:

At the least, a serious ethics investigation is in order.

• E For Effort:

Right now I am prepared to give the Democrats in Congress an E for Effort on their Health Insurance Premium Assistance Bill, but I still want a favor — forget the pipe dream of 60 votes in the Senate and figure out what you can pass through R for Reconciliation.

• The “Reform” In the Health Bill: If Only It Were So:

In the real world, one program HAS worked. Only one. Medicare.

• The World’s Worst “Greatest Deliberative Body”:

A couple of days ago, I asked Senator Spector about our dysfunctional Senate:

• Quote of the Day:

Wow. People should not care about issues because that might hurt someone’s electoral chances? Wow.

TalkLeft is not a bad blog; it is, I’m sure, the sort of thing I would enjoy if I enjoyed that sort of thing. It’s just not (despite its subtitle, “the politics of crime”) a criminal justice blog; it is, instead, a political blog (or, in the ABA’s taxonomy, maybe a News Blog). The problem with it being in the same category as Simple Justice is that as a news/politics blog TalkLeft has thousands of news/politics readers who know nothing, and care less, about criminal justice blogs. It would make as much sense to put Above The Law in some category other than News—it will kill in whatever category it’s in.

But the ABA Journal’s voting would be a joke even without its slaphappy categorization of blogs. The ABA Journal’s process is designed to determine nothing more than which blog has the most readers who are willing to register with the ABA Journal to vote for it.

Popularity is no indicator of quality. If you want to find the best law blogs, you don’t ask the masses. You ask the people who have given some thought to what makes a good blog: you ask bloggers.

So here’s the First Annual Social Media Tyro Best Law Blogs Contest.

If you blog regularly (at least once a week), even outside the field of law, you are entitled to vote. To vote, write a post listing what you think is the best blog in each of these categories:

• Best Personal Injury Law Blog:
• Best Business Law Blog:
• Best Criminal Law Blog:
• Best Family Law Blog:
• Best General Law Blog:
• Best Intellectual Property Law Blog
• Best Legal News or Politics Blog:
• Best Legal Humor Blog:
• Best Legal Criticism or Opinion Blog:
• Best Law Practice Management Blog:
• Best Legal Tech Blog:
• Best Courtwatching Blog:
• Best Law Prof Blog:
• Best Law Blog Based Outside the U.S.
• Best Law Blog in a Category SMT forgot:

Post before the end of this year, with a link to this post so I’ll be sure to see your post.

Each blog gets one ballot. If you don’t have an opinion in any category, feel free to leave it blank. Please don’t try to game the voting (koff koff Lexblog koff)—it will backfire.

On the first of the year I will collate and report the results.

Anonymous Commenting, 1872

People often seek to justify leaving anonymous comments on blogs by explaining that they are employed by governmental agencies or companies that would frown on them using their names in connection with their opinions.

It is true that having a regular job with a paycheck and benefits can have some costs; one of these costs can be that your employer might punish you for saying the wrong thing in public.

But it has always been thus. So I wondered to myself, “what did these people do before the internet when they wanted to express their opinions but were afraid it would harm them at work?”

Then I realized:

(Ku Klux Klan, Mississippi, 1872, in the public domain from Harper’s Weekly via Wikimedia.)