Bad Review, Bad Response, Bad Idea

responding to negative reviews as a lawyer

What Lawyers Need to Understand About Online Reviews, Ethics, and Real-World Risk Bad reviews happen. Sometimes fairly. Sometimes unfairly. Sometimes from people who were never your clients at all. What gets lawyers into ethical trouble is not usually the review. It is the response. I see the same pattern repeatedly. A lawyer feels misrepresented or […]

When You See a Gmail Address for an Advertiser or SEO – Run

Professional Advertisers Do Not Use Gmail When I was at my old firm, I constantly received messages from “SEO companies” claiming that they could get the firm to the top of Google for whatever keyword. Most of these messages were sent through the law firm’s contact page. Some of them came directly through email. Almost […]

Every Lawyer Should Have a Website

This video explores how lawyers can create a website. I discuss WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace. I also offer some tips. For a follow-up blog post see Why Every Lawyer Needs a Website.

Website Security, SEO, Portals & Legal Ethics

I am a member of the Pennsylvania Bar Association Cybersecurity & Data Privacy Committee. As part of that committee, I write a blog post per year. My blog post for 2020 is on how website security matters for marketing (including search engine optimization). It also addresses why lawyers and their clients need to be aware […]

The Proper Response to a Bad Review is Not to Attack the Customer

People who know me in real life know that I (used) to speak frequently on issues involving legal ethics. This includes the topic of how lawyers should handle bad reviews.* One piece of advice I offer applies not just to lawyers, but all businesses, and that is: Do not respond to a bad review by attacking […]

The Myth That High Ranking on SERPs Equals Clients 

High Ranking Always Brings in Clients…Or Does It? For many years lawyers and businesses have heard one thing: you must rank first on SERPs (search engine results pages) for certain key words to get clients on the web. And those key words must be things like “family law attorney philadelphia”, “nursing home abuse las vegas”, […]

Podcast: Chatting About WordPress

My friend and colleague, Tim Baran of Good2bSocial, interviewed me about the use of WordPress to create law firm websites. Take a listen and enjoy my dulcet tones.