In one easy step. Have your lawyers send a letter demanding that a blogger take down a post. This will buy you all the bad publicity in the world – for free! You'll be the subject of countless blog posts, more – and much worse – information about you will be strewn about the internet. People will even post all of your Better Business Bureau complaints – which are extensive and not exactly glowing references for your business. Big blogs with enormous readerships will give their many, many readers all the details and links to various things you probably wish nobody had ever seen.
Big, powerful law firms like Nashville's King & Ballow really ought to hire someone with journalistic and new media experience to advise them on how to handle clients who complain about things published by bloggers. Then they wouldn't do stupid things like issue threats of libel suits that they can't win against bloggers who, it turns out, have lots of friends willing to make the law firm and its client look bad for it..
That thought occurred to me as I read that Nashville blogger Katherine Coble is being threatened by the powerful Nashville law firm King & Ballow with a libel lawsuit unless she removes from her blog something she wrote that offended one of the law firm's clients. King & Ballow sent Coble a "demand letter" demanding she take down a post she published. K&B and the client – the headhunter firm JL Kirk Associates – are already getting blowback – and it's only going to get worse as word of the case spreads throughout the blogosphere.
But, hey, if you're really out to see your own business destroyed, this is definitely the way to go!
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If she was expressing her opinion, she is protected. If what she said can be supported by facts, she is protected.
And if they had just let it alone, THEY would have been protected from the bad publicity and blowbacks.
Law firms have a bad habit of considering themselves somewhat “godlike” and unassailable and thus, by extension, their clients are the same. Time they learned otherwise – and I make my living working for lawyers!
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