Legal Research

Managing Your Professional Reputation Online

Steve Matthews over at Stem Legal has written a very useful article on managing your online reputation. He writes:

Online reputation management isn't a question of blogging gone badly, or someone posting drunken pictures in Facebook (although both are possible). It's a business issue for every lawyer who practises, and it requires some form of monitoring and, more often than not, active attention...

Perhaps surprisingly, it is not the lawyers who participate online who are most vulnerable to negative reputation risks. More often, it's lawyers without a web publishing presence, and with a related dearth of content about them, who are at the greatest risk. Unfortunately, in many firms, that group includes the senior members of the partnership...

So if bad profile on the web lingers in the search engines if it isn't addressed, and if the adage of keeping silent and letting things blow over no longer works, what does? The answers come in the form of personal web publishing and developing one's online voice. When a client or prospective client goes hunting for content about a lawyer, that content should accentuate the positives and help bury the negative.

Full post as published by WisBlawg - From the UW Law Library on March 12, 2008 (boomark / email).