Goodbye LegalMatch, Hello CasePost

Long time readers of this blog are familiar with my relationship with LegalMatch.  After writing a post that criticized LegalMatch’s sales tactics, I got to know Randy Wells, LegalMatch’s then-CEO.  Randy was the person who reached out to me and convinced me that LegalMatch was a good company made up of good people, and even apologized for LegalMatch’s sales tactics.  After meeting many LegalMatch employees at a retreat I facilitated for them, I chronicled my experiences with a post titled “LegalMatch and Me” that I thought would put to bed the LegalMatch saga on my blog.  Since then, I’ve not written anything about LegalMatch (except for this).  In what I thought was my final post about the company, I said:

Starting today, I’m changing the title of my original post to “Don’t Sell Like This.” [from “Why I’ll Never Use LegalMatch”]  The comments will remain active, and the content won’t change.  The titles of the rest of my LM posts will stay the same, and I’ll keep the LegalMatch category alive. … I’m ultimately doing what I’m doing because I think it is right, and because I’ve gotten to like a lot of folks at LegalMatch.  Will I work with LegalMatch in the future?  Possibly.  Will LegalMatch be involved with LexThink in some way?  Maybe.  Is this some horrible violation of blogger ethics?  I’m sure you’ll tell me so.  Thanks for your time, and now back to regular blogging. 

After that post, Randy Wells and I continued to talk about ways we could work together.  He even asked me to join an informal “Board of Advisors” for the company.  He felt that with my unique perspective, I could help LegalMatch continue many of the innovative programs they discussed at the brainstorming retreat.  Though I continued to talk to Randy, whom I now considered a friend, I declined the Board of Advisor role because I didn’t want to violate some unwritten “Blogger Code of Ethics” and feel pressured to remove the LegalMatch content and/or edit, censor, or delete third-party comments on my blog.  I thought any financial interest I had in LegalMatch would conflict with my blog’s role as a place where people could post opinions pro and con on the merits of the company or the service they provided.

Now I face the opposite problem.  Randy has since left LegalMatch and joined CasePost.  CasePost is LegalMatch’s chief competitor.  As I did when Randy was with LegalMatch, I speak with him regularly about innovation in the legal business.  And as he did when he was at LegalMatch, Randy has again asked me to join a “Board of Advisors” for CasePost.  This time, I’ve accepted, though I’ve yet to sign any contract or accept any compensation.

Here’s my problem.  I don’t know what to do with the LegalMatch content on my site.  I don’t have anything bad to say about LegalMatch, though I’ve been given plenty of opportunities to do so in the past 12 months.  If my LegalMatch content had dropped off the front page of Google, like I’d hoped, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.  Google LegalMatch and my blog is still the fourth result.  That doesn’t bother me so much, because anyone who reads the entirety of my posts, knows my opinion of LegalMatch (as of my last post) had changed.  However, I still get comments on my posts quite regularly, both pro and con. 

Recently, though, I’m getting comments like this one:

Odd that someone sitting on the ADVISORY BOARD at CasePost.com http://www.casepost.com/ourteam.php would be against LegalMatch.

Way to be ethical and two faced.  Oh yeah, Randy Wells is the CEO over there now. Odd bedfellows.

So, I’m asking you dear readers, to give me some input.  Before I do, I want to make a few things clear:

1.  I don’t care whether the LegalMatch content stays on my site or not.  It is neither what I write about, nor what I care about, and frankly, it is probably a bit stale.  A lot has happened at LegalMatch since I wrote any of it, so I’m not sure, one way or the other, if any of my opinions (or those of the commentors) are still valid.

2.  I don’t know if CasePost’s service or technology  is any “better” than LegalMatch’s.  I really, really like the LegalMatch/CasePost model of matching clients with lawyers.  It is a need that both companies (at least technologically) fill well.  The winner in this race will succeed on service and not technology. 

3.  I liked the LegalMatch people I met at the retreat in California, though I don’t know how many remain at LegalMatch.  I did meet Laurie Ziffrin, the new LegalMatch CEO, and found her to be a very smart person, knowledgeable about the industry, and a great card player.

4.  I want see what blogs, transparency, and word of mouth marketing can do for a legal company (much like what Hugh McLeod has done for Stormhoek Wine), and CasePost seems like a logical choice.  The CEO is willing to try some new things to grow his company, and I have several ideas I think will work.

5.  I  want to make money from my relationship with CasePost.  I’ve given away a lot of free advice to both of these companies (though I was paid through LexThink for the LegalMatch retreat) and would like to profit if my ideas add value to the company.

Here are my choices as I see them (feel free to add more in the comments to this post):

A.  I can do nothing.

B.  I can append a sort of “disclaimer” to each LegalMatch post, revealing my new connection with CasePost and linking to this blog entry.

C.  I can delete all the LegalMatch-related material.

I am inclined to at least do B, if not C.  What do you think?   

Comments

[Tim Marman]

I would suggest option B. Disclosure goes a long way, especially if it's highlighted on top of the post. Leave the requisite disclaimer that this was written prior to your relationship with CasePost and should be treated accordingly.

(I do something similar when content becomes stale or context otherwise changes and a post is hit heavily from google).

[Bill]

If your main concern is that the blog posts show up in Search Engine indexes, there are several solutions you can generally apply.

If you had this blog on your own website, I'd say to put "noindex" tags on the LegalMatch posts in your robots.txt file.

However, I'm not familiar with how typepad handles this issue. There should be a way to tell search engines (through Typepad) "don't index this page".

If your core concern focuses on getting your posts out of the search engine results, then I'd suggest digging through Typepad's online help. There should be a way to control that at the page-level

Warmly,

Bill