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Legal Research

: Slaw.ca

Is Your Firm on Wikipedia?

By Simon Fodden

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Rupert White of the U.K. Law Society’s Gazette has a couple of articles on law firms’ use of Wikipedia: “Top 50 firms that get Wikipedia - and those that don’t” and “Why the world’s favourite encyclopedia matters.” His basic position is that a law firm should have a page on Wikipedia and should groom it regularly to make certain it’s accurate, full (definitely not “fulsome,” as he has it!) and up-to-date.

I’m less convinced that a Wikipedia page is a necessity. After all, if your firm comes up top in a Google search for key components of the firm name, the curious will go to your firm’s website (which is another story altogether) for information. There is, however, the possibility that it won’t come up first and that a Wikipedia page about the firm will be near the top. As well, some people go to Wikipedia first or right after Google to flesh out their understanding.

Even more important, though, is that if there is to be a page about your firm it be edited by your firm. Although a moment’s thought will make it clear that because anyone can create and edit a page on Wikipedia (more or less) there’s no necessity that any page about your firm will be written by people with the firm’s interests at heart or with the requisite knowledge, it’s still likely to surprise some lawyers that there could be information out there about their firm that is wrong if only because it is outdated or insufficient.

In a completely unscientific way, I checked a few of the bigger Canadian firms just to see how they fared. I chose at random and in no particular order Stikeman, McCarthy, Heenan, Aird, Blakes, and Osler. Here’s a chart that shows briefly what I found.

Firm & Google search term	Home page position	Wikipedia page position	My comments on the Wikipedia site
Stikeman	1	6	ok / brief / edited reg. [link]
McCarthy Tetrault	1	4	poor / very brief / edited 3 times a year? [link]
Heenan	1	not in first window	ok / brief / Heenan Toronto edited it in 2008 [link]
Aird	1	4 (disabiguation page)	very good / lots of material / photo of location / links to refs. on members / edited regularly [link]
Blakes	1	not in first window	“Blakes” redirects on Wikipedia to “Blake Cassels & Graydon” / very poor / brief / recent editing by unknown persons [link]
Osler	1	not in first window	poor / brief / oddly, has compensation scale for associates added in March of 2009 [link]

The “good news” is that these firms all have something on Wikipedia. The “bad news” is that in most cases it’s very weak. Only Aird’s page would convey anything truly positive to a viewer. As well, it’s not clear that all of the pages are curried by people from the firm. It would seem that a bunch of pages were established by people not involved in the firms, because some are identified as members of the named “seven sisters law firms of Toronto”: “Blake, Cassels & Graydon · Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg · Goodmans · McCarthy Tétrault · Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt · Stikeman Elliott · Torys” all of which names (except Osler) are linked to the appropriate firms’ Wikipedia pages.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on May 29, 2009 (boomark / email).