Legal and Online PR

24 hours a day, 7 days a week - your company is online, being adored, abused and sometimes even questioned legally.

Recently a lot of our clients have been reporting serious issues online. That is why we decided to team up with two of Ireland's largest law firms to offer a legal consultancy service for our clients. We quickly learnt that the problem wasn't always a case of prevention and retaliation, it was a case of using technology itself, not just the law, to prevent our clients from falling victim to uncensored defamation.

To combat this we setup our Legal and Online Public Relations Department.

Reducing public relation headaches online

There are many ways to keep poor public relations at bay online, the most effective being; building a positive profile before the inevitable happens. This can be done by a number of means, such as:

• Blogging and using social networking effectively.
• Referrals and reciprocal links to trusted / established websites.
• Positive reviews / testimonials from well known / trusted clients
• Good site rankings in Google and other search engines
• Publically posting disclaimers, policies, etc to reduce attempted legal actions / defamation.

All these, particularly the last element, disclaimers and policies, can help deter potential defamation and legal action. Smith and Wise recommends everyone to ensure their websites, certainly if supplying information or selling products / services, ticks at least a few of the boxes above. If in doubt we can help you!

Dealing with attempted / threatened legal action

Most law firms won't know an awful lot about online defamation, or online copyright infringement, as they are rare enough occurrences, and rarely yield high awards. However the legal firms we deal with, two of Ireland's best, do know how to deal with any form of online allegations. Working together with Smith and Wise, we can help you form a professional response to such threats. Often the letter of a more prominent law firm arriving in the letterbox is enough to put people off pursuing action, if not, our legal partners can assist you each step of the way to getting your issue resolved.

Smith and Wise is dedicated to serving our clients confidentially in such matters, something which has already helped our first legal client to successfully have unauthorised content removed from another website.

Taking legal action

Taking legal action can often be a nightmare. Online, this is even more so the case, as international law, and third party agreements often need to be taken into account. However Smith and Wise and our legal partners can advise you through each step of the way, and if necessary, represent your organisation as required. The most important thing for Smith and Wise is that our clients are well represented, and we can guarantee that by using our legal representatives, winners of several "Most Trusted Law Firm In Ireland" awards each, are really the best people to talk to when you have problems.

 

Coping with nightmare online content

One of the most common causes of poor online public relations is caused by do gooder staff getting overly involved in arguments with malicious third parties. This has occurred previously on several occasions, hence why we recommend our clients never to get angry at bloggers, or forum users anywhere, and certainly, if they do, not to take it out on them. There is a set way to deal with such circumstances which requires skill to devalue such search results against legitimate results, and it certainly isn't by openly ranting at and/or threatening people. Smith and Wise takes a technical approach to help delist such entries from defaming sites and networks, and secondly can access the need for legal action.

 

Contacting Us

If you are interested in finding out more about Online Public Relations or require legal advice on any commercial or online activities, please do contact us.

+ 00 353 (0)86 1780 743 or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it