Can law firms be liable for fake reviews? Pennsylvania firm says no | Hacker News Reader

Can law firms be liable for fake reviews? Pennsylvania firm says no

reuters.com

73 pointshhs28 comments

If they were indeed family members and employees posting reviews and they are all coming from the same IP address it seems like there is enough evidence to warrant looking into it.

Also, they should be subject to the law like everyone else. If they are behaving unethically and breaking advertising laws and deceiving consumers, fuck them. They should be punished. Fullstop. Just because they are a law firm doesn't grant them special privilege outside of the act of giving legal advice. Fake reviews aren't legal advice.

If her allegations are true, I hope she wins and it sets a good precedent about fake reviews.

Not only are lawyers subject to the law just like everyone else, they are also subject to additional rules by the state bar. There are complex rules governing attorney advertising, which have long applied to typical advertising (e.g., TV commercials, magazine ads), and if they were indeed coercing employees to solicit reviews that they know to be untrue, they would likely fall afoul of some of these ethical rules.

But according to Kraemer Manes’ filings in the Wolfe case, business cannot be held responsible for what other people say about them online. The law firm argued in its reply brief seeking dismissal that Wolfe’s theory would open a Pandora’s box of liability for any business that failed to police online reviews for accuracy.

That's preposterous. People (for the most part) don't just sit around writing fake reviews for companies they have no dealings with. If fake reviews about an organization exist, they were commissioned by the organization or its associates. I guess you could try to get a competitor in trouble by creating obviously fake reviews and hoping said competitor gets taken to court over them; but that seems like a lot of trouble, high risk, and not something worth worrying about.

It will be interesting to see what comes out of this case.

> That's preposterous. People (for the most part) don't just sit around writing fake reviews for companies they have no dealings with.

I have several anecdotes from small business owners who'd tell you otherwise.

You would be surprised as it does happen. The far more common is the reviews where what happened and what is claimed to have happen in the review have a such a tenuous connection that it would be more acccurate to call them a total work of fiction.

The suit argues that the law firm paid people to write the reviews.

>> That's preposterous. People (for the most part) don't just sit around writing fake reviews for companies they have no dealings with.

Try being a defense attorney. Try defending murderers and rapists all day. There are always more people angry at you than happy. And those that are happy with your work, the murders and rapists you help, generally keep very quiet. Those that aren't in prison are not going to be bragging online. What you will get are angry relatives and victims lashing out at anyone connected with the defense.

I used to teach a class with a public defender. He was afraid to walk alone to his car at night. It wasn't his clients. They were generally all in jail. He was afraid of the mothers of his clients' victims.

We're talking about fake glowing reviews. Who has incentive to write these?

If the firm is going to be liable for policing the fake positive reviews, anyone with an ax to grind.

Let me fix that for you. "If the firm is going to be for writing and soliciting fake positive reviews...."

Sandworm is responding to the statement that:

> People (for the most part) don't just sit around writing fake reviews for companies they have no dealings with.

And

> If fake reviews about an organization exist, they were commissioned by the organization or its associates.

That is, to a proposed standard where the mere existence of the reviews causes you legal problems as the solicitation part is presumed.

Actually there is an entire black hat industry dedicated to leaving fake reviews to drown competitors.

The problem here is that reading fake reviews on its own would not cause an injury. If the law firm had won the case, the woman would not have suffered any harm. Harm could only arise due to the reviews being inaccurate.

"A number of positive reviews for this business originated from the same IP address. Our automated recommendation software has taken this into account in choosing which reviews to display, but we wanted to call this to your attention because someone may be trying to artificially inflate the rating for this business."

Ok the reviews were obviously fake if they came from the same IP. Seems highly unlikely that several people from the same building would have just happened to use the same law firm and all write glowing 5 star reviews.

I think that all review sites should require some sort of verification from a reviewer that you actually were a customer of the business.

There is a little bit of a problem with that.

I used to work at a company that did review aggregation and analytics. Car dealerships were among our most important customers.

One dealership decided that they would set up a kiosk and ask customers to write reviews on the spot. A lot of them did. These reviews all came from the same IP address because they were written at the dealership's kiosk, and a few review sites decided they were all fake and deleted them.

It was difficult explaining to those customers that their reviews looked fake, even though they were not. At the same time, there were probably some other dealerships where the salespeople were writing reviews and pretending to be customers.

True there are some places that do that, but I think it's probably not a good practice to ask a customer to write a review while you're watching them on premise. There just needs to be awareness that that sort of thing is not OK.

>> A number of positive reviews for this business originated from the same IP address.

That was once a reasonable red flag, but IP addresses a so shared these days that it is expected that many come from the same address. Just think of how many restaurant reviews are submitted via the reviewed restaurant's own wifi, the same IP used by its employees. It is not unreasonable to believe that at least some reviews for a law firm would come from its own systems. If I were sitting in the lobby, waiting for my lawyer who is always late, I might submit a review via her guest wifi network.

Far more preferable though to delete some legitimate reviews than to have a fake one go through. As the consumer that would definitely be my preference. You won't create a perfect system, but as long as most fakes are filtered out and some legitimate ones are deleted that's much more ideal than not being able to guard against fakes.

Where I live, two fixed wireless ISPs have about 75% of the market. One offers only NAT, while the other offers only NAT on all but their most expensive plans. So in my area, 75% of the internet traffic comes from just two IP addresses. Moreover, because there's only one backhaul provider, those two ISPs, the county offices, the hospital, the public library and the schools all have traffic originating from a smallish set of addresses in the same AS. Probably the same class C, but I can't say that for sure.

Reviews coming from the same IP is a useful signal for detecting fraud, but it certainly shouldn't be considered proof positive.

This makes me curious who would be going "too far" in posting fake reviews. What about the marketplace itself? Some of the Amazon brands have mediocre or lower scores on fakespot:

https://www.fakespot.com/company/goodthreads https://www.fakespot.com/company/happy-belly

There are other explanations, but that really surprised me.

Better headline would be "Can a regular person challenge a law firm and win?"

I don't think anybody would be surprised to learn that the answer is no.

The article certainly does not support that answer, nor does the amount paid out in malpractice claims every year. In fact, law firms are probably amongst the easiest things to sue and win in most states.

Huh. Anecdote: I got divorced about five years ago. My ex's attorney was so lazy/ incompetent/ etc. that she let him go. During the finalization of things, I pointed out that in at least two filings, her attorney was so inept that I went from being the the respondent to being plaintiff about half way through the filings. And another clause was about division of commingled property that we'd never owned (and that seemed obviously cut and pasted from another client).

Those were decreed to be "honest mistakes", and not the result of negligence or malpractice.

That sounds like such a strange situation to be in. Did you find your self holding back to compensate for the incompetence?

Especially on the plaintiff side... the party you’re representing has already exhibited their willingness to initiate a lawsuit.

Not necessarily. Sure, the 'fake reviews' may not fit neatly into a malpractice claim- a negligence tort- win for the plaintiff. But, if the plaintiff- Ms. Wolfe- can prove that the fake reviews were intentionally orchestrated by the law firm, then then that state bar's ethics committee may indeed have something to say; and, a regular person will prevail against a law firm which will suffer consequences.

I hope this gets attention and the fake reviews get counter balanced

With fake reviews in the opposite direction?

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