Lawyer Blogs and Copyright Infringement

© 2009, Brandon Cornett.

It's time for another lesson in lawyer marketing, courtesy of the Web Smart Lawyer. Here is today's lesson:

Lawyers are supposed to understand and respect the law, right? So it would be embarrassing for a lawyer blog to wander astray of copyright laws, don’t you think? This is exactly what can happen if you let an internet marketing firm writing content for your blog. And here’s a real-world example for you:

I recently stumbled across a Texas bankruptcy lawyer’s blog that had stolen a good deal of content from one of my own blogs. They had taken entire articles from my site, published them onto the lawyer blog, and passed it off as their own content. They had even converted one of my own personal anecdotes into a “client case study.” What kind of lawyer violates copyright laws out of sheer laziness? Well, in this case, it was the result of a lawyer blog company called Lex Blog. It is my understanding that they put the content there.

So who’s to blame in a situation like this? Who is the real copyright violator? Well, regardless of who actually stole the content from my site, I’d say the blame falls onto the shoulders of the blog’s owner (in this case, the Texas bankruptcy law firm). That’s who I would hold responsible. And if I had actually filed a DMCA complaint with that lawyer’s web hosting company, they probably would have shut his website down. I’ve had to do this on two other occasions, in cases of blatant copyright violation, and both times the hosting company acted swiftly to shut down the offending websites.

Of course, this is an easy problem to avoid. Just write your own content. You should be doing this anyway, to position yourself as an authority. But you should also do it to avoid copyright infringement (unbeknown to you). If you let an Internet marketing firm write the content for your lawyer blog, there’s a 50/50 chance you’ll end up with plagiarized content on the site. Why? Because many people in the Internet marketing field are scumbags. I worked in that industry for several years, so I know this firsthand. And it’s the primary reason I left that field and started an Internet publishing company. These days, I often butt heads with these very scumbags, because they steal content from my various websites on a regular basis. Lazy — that’s all it is.

Aside from the risk of copyright infringement, you should write your own blog content for other reasons too. The whole point of publishing a lawyer blog is to establish your expertise in your field. How can you do that if you publish work by other authors?