A lot of people refer to the internet the “new wild west” because people and companies can derive riches from doing semi-unethical and unethical things. This article discusses a few of my personal opinions about how FindLaw has targeted my law firm websites.

I recently noticed that FindLaw (AKA Thompson West) has been accessing my two law firm websites (http://www.irstaxtrouble.com and http://www.colorado-estateplanning-attorney.com). Upon further review of my website statistics, I noticed that FindLaw visited my website using some very specific key words in the Google search engine (“tax attorney” for irstaxtrouble.com and “estate planning lawyer in Denver, CO” for my colorado-estateplanning-attorney.com website). I then ran a search on Google using these keywords and discovered that my website was the top listed website for the words.

A few weeks later, after FindLaw visited my site again (using the same keywords), I searched Google using these keywords only to find that generic FindLaw websites now rank number one for these keywords. Essentially these generic websites list a bunch of unrelated information (for example, the tax site lists basic tax forms etc. – not exactly stuff folks would need if they were looking for a “tax attorney.”), but includes a “find a lawyer” link at the very top of the page.

So what is the problem? The problem is that FindLaw is now sending me marketing pieces trying to get me to pay to be listed on their website. If I pay to be listed, I will be one of the hundreds of attorneys on their list (presumably off of the link on the website that they intentionally made rank higher than my own website). If FindLaw did not exist (and did not go out of their way to put their site above mine in the search engines), I would be number one on Google for the keywords anyway.

So what FindLaw is doing is gaming the search engines (such as Google) to profit off of unsuspecting lawyers by providing lawyers with something they would already have (for free from the search engines) if FindLaw didn’t game the search engines.

The function (and beauty) of search engines (such as Google) is that they were to go out and find (i.e., spider) websites and sort those websites (using their proprietary algorithms) in order to return relevant results; making it easy to find what you are looking for on the internet. Websites like those put up by FindLaw undermine this function, making search engines produce ineffective results (for example, those searching for a “tax attorney” will be directed away from “tax attorney” websites (such as mine) and be directed to FindLaw’s list of tax forms, etc.).

My personal opinion is that (1) FindLaw websites should be banned from the major search engines (if you know anyone at Google, please forward this post to them) and (2) gaming a search engine to lessen my law firm website ranking so that this company can profit off of listing me on their site is nothing more than a scam. What do you think?

Kreig Mitchell is a Colorado tax attorney whose practice focuses on resolving IRS audit, post-audit, and IRS collections tax controversies; tax opinion letters, and estate and business planning.