Likelihood of Success

Wow.  Remember what I said?  (And I’m not the only one.)  No matter what you do, don’t be stupid and buy into what some consultant sells you as “social networking” to build your practice if you don’t have (1) something to say, and (2) a gift — or a honed set of skills — for saying it in compelling fashion.

Well, that doesn’t mean that if you don’t have these things, the next best thing is to just steal it from someone else!

You really have to read this to see what @ScottGreenfield is talking about.  But here’s a sample of what on earth is going on out there, where it’s evidently nuts:

Scott Greenfield was displeased to discover that his RSS feed was being “scraped” and reproduced by an outfit called USLaw. When confronted by Greenfield,USLaw behaved unprofessionally; their unsatisfactory response prompted Greenfield to reconfigure his feed to offer only partial posts. While this is entirely understandable and part of a Greenfield post beats a dozen posts from most bloggers, the change was not in Greenfield’s interests or his readers’; it was a necessary but regrettable response to unprofessional behavior. For what it’s worth, while it was well beyond fair use for them to reproduce the posts as they did, USLaw didn’t represent Greenfield’s writing as anything but his work. USLaw behaved unprofessionally, but they were not obligated to do otherwise. As far as I can tell, they are not practicing attorneys; although they operate in the broader legal internet space, they are not legal professionals bound by codes of ethical conduct and subject to discipline for unethical behavior.

Without excusing USLaw’s conduct, what’s been done by attorney Melina Bennighoff or on her behalf by a marketer is much more objectionable. As Bennett explains, Benninghoff scraped posts from Bennett’s blog and others’ without those authors’ consents and reposted these on Benninghoff’s blog. It is noteworthy that the reposted items are identified as “by benninghofflaw”. A cursory search online revealed that Benninghoff has also set up several Twitter accounts with false names and pictures to drive traffic to her singularly ridiculous blog and boost her position in search engines.

What this boils down to is a practicing attorney lifting copyrighted content from other sites and presenting it as her own work for commercial benefit. That she may have hired a marketing consultant who has done these things in her name and for her benefit may be meaningful to some, but it shouldn’t matter; attorneys are, and should be, ethically responsible for their own actions and those of their agents. . . .

Confronted by Bennett, Benninghoff’s marketer, Wayne Conley, responded unconvincinglyand set-up a fake Twitter account using Bannett’s wife’s name. At Legal Blog Watch, Carolyn Elefant wrote about the whole sorry affair, calling it “Law Firm Marketer Gone Wild”.

It’s the Wild West out there.

Man.

And… don’t even think about it.  I say that with all due modesty.