2 Comments

1. Jdog  •  Nov 7, 2009 @9:25 am
   

   It’s long since occurred to me that there should be some legitimate use of a non-lawyer employee to promote, maybe even via a blog, a lawyer’s services. Scouring the intertubes for writings that might be of interest to that lawyer’s potential clients, and reposting/excerpting (as appropriate, complete with links; I’m talking about aggregating, not appropriating), so that folks interested in whatever that lawyer does might be drawn there, potentially attracting some potential clients. (I’m assuming, for these purposes, that the simple-but-difficult method of the lawyer writing lots of interesting stuff is something that the lawyer either can’t or doesn’t want to do — time, ability, interest.)

   But to make it valuable, there’d have to be some value added — if only by selecting stuff that is interesting and unselecting stuff that isn’t — and that’s not something that can be outsourced to either some software or low-paid and low-skilled biological wetware that doesn’t know anything about the underlying issues.

   Sounds, actually, like something more suited for Biglaw folks, who could (should is another issue) spend a chunk of money that would easily stack up to five figures annually on the aggregator person, with additional time and money spent by associates monitoring it.

   What we see, instead, from time to time, is something like what this appears to have been — just an outsourcing of robotic scraping.

2. Eric T.  •  Nov 7, 2009 @7:24 pm
   

   I wasn’t the only one that was scraped. For the first 6 days of November there were well over 100 posts.

   The webmasters that do this should not only be fired, but publicly identified. Perhaps after a few dozen of those, word will circulate in the legal world to be ultra-wary of outsourcing marketing and ethics, and word will spread in the webmaster community that they had best keep their noses clean when it comes to the lawyers.

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