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Your Business: Someone Online Hates You

By Josh King
September 02, 2013

As word of mouth moves online, lawyers occupy the same place today that hotels were in a decade ago: just starting to face the prospect of widespread use of online user reviews, and concerned that such reviews will crater their businesses. Hotels, like restaurants and consumer products before them, have learned to live with, and quite often leverage, the phenomenon of online reviews. While no system of reviews is perfect, getting enough liquidity into the “reputational ecosystem” has created a resource that helps expose those establishments offering subpar service, while celebrating the virtues of those that shine. Lawyers, who would be wise to recognize the inevitability of this trend to professional services, are often hyper-focused on the potential for negative and phony reviews. This can cause paralysis and failure to adapt to this massive change in how clients are researching lawyers. The following 10 tips will put these concerns into context and explore which methods of responding to negative feedback are effective and ethical and which ones aren't.

1. Why Reviews Are Important

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