Legal Writing

Hot Coffee & BP — Law Firms Ignoring Copyrights — Accidents Waiting to Happen

Like cats to mice in motion, tragedies, catastrophes, and oddities grab our attention. And they make us think, at least for as long as it takes a cat to realize, “that wasn’t a mouse; that was a just a maple leaf dancing to the breeze.”

Someone sent me a link to this striking video that shows what happens when you try to extinguish a grease fire with water: quite the opposite of what you might expect.

Not only is the 30-second video a real eye grabber, it’s a great reminder to to all — be careful!

I thought about that for a few moments and then I remembered the story of the woman who sued McDonald’s because she spilled hot coffee in her lap. People were astonished to learn a jury awarded the women nearly $3 million for doing something stupid.

And I thought about the situation in the Gulf — about birds soaked in oil, BP and Tony Hayward and engineers arguing whether to pump sea water or mud. I thought about how things can be going along as just dull as can be, and then BAM!

Some event occurs and our attention turns to it, for just a moment, or for much more — hundreds of thousands of words and opinions, and tens of billions of dollars.

“If only we’d been paying better attention to what we were doing . . . .”

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I’m not talking about a fantastic event now. I’m talking about errors sometimes made by people in the marketing departments of law firms because they don’t know the law and their attorneys don’t ever look at their firms’ web sites.

I’m talking about law firms ignoring copyrights, especially when it comes to news articles.

Here’s what happens more often than you might expect. A law firm hires an SEO expert who says the firm has to mention what’s in the news if it wants top rankings by Google. Lacking the time (or other resources) required to follow such expert advice, marketing looks for news articles containing certain key words, as well as articles in magazines and journals or published on web sites: articles protected by copyright law.

Some firms do more than mention news articles or provide links to them. Some offer extended excerpts; some republish entire articles.

Some of those firms are pretty small, and some of them are pretty big.

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Here’s what you need to know if you work for the marketing department of a law firm: if you get into the habit of publishing things published by others, you’re breaking the law and you’re exposing your firm — not just to legal liability but, potentially — to heaps of ridicule, especially if the firm has an intellectual property practice.

If that ever happens, not only are you going to take a hit, but the head of your firm’s IP group is going to look like an ass. Some of the firm’s attorneys are going to be wondering (after they blame everything on those fools in marketing) why they never, ever looked at the firm’s web site — why they didn’t bother to practice due diligence with their little digital billboard.

I wouldn’t even mention it except for this. In the course of my work, I very often review the web sites of law firms, and I often do this: I take a quick look at the News section to see if one of the top articles belongs to a party who has NOT given the firm permission (as required) to republish it.

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I’m also talking about an event you don’t want to cause, especially if you work in the marketing department of a law firm that pays well.

The event is this — some great big news organization wants to make a bold statement. It wants to let everyone know that they can’t just pilfer its property.

It’s going to make an example of someone, and that someone is very likely to be a great big law firm with a great big IP practice.

What could make for a better example of what can happen when you willfully and knowingly violate the law over and over than suing a bunch of lawyers who do just that?

Let me tell you this: if you’re posting articles that belong to the AP or some other large news organization (as some firms are), you’re playing with fire.

Full post as published by Set in Style on June 21, 2010 (boomark / email).