Online Defamation By Employees

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It is only when you wake up one morning to the devastating reality of seeing your business reputation being tarnished all over the internet that you can fully appreciate the benefits of having in place a reliable online reputation alarm system.

Would any person in their right mind wait until a fire occurs before seriously considering taking out an insurance policy? Surely not. Online reputation attacks spread on the internet (and then continue to spread off-line), in the same way that every fire starts with a single spark, which then turns rapidly into massive balls of fire that burn and raise to the ground everything you ever worked for. Online reputation attacks tend to spread so fast that they can finish off any business, which is not well equipped to deal with them.

The larger your business is, the stronger the flames. After all, fire has never been known to be deterred by the size of the bush and this is a fact. There is simple mathematics to all of this. The more inflammatory the internet posting about your business is, the quicker it will normally spread - by blogs, web links, twitter, Facebook and emails. A single link to a defamatory website about your business can be sent out by email to a mailing list which could contain thousands of subscribers in less than 5 minutes.

Each recipient of the link may then forward it on to their own mailing list the recipients of which, may also forward it on. In total - it could take l0 minutes or less, for what you have worked for all your life, to go up in flames. This is of course the worst scenario. At best, it would take a few days before the defamatory webpages about your business, take up the best part of the first page of the search engines, for everyone else to see.

Very unfortunately, I have seen exactly this course of events occurring to an IT company from Israel who had been trading in the UK very successfully for over two years. Having discovered that its UK Director was stealing from the company, the head office in Israel decided to summarily dismiss him.

The Director, who was well vested in the technical side of the internet, decided to take revenge by posting negative comments and reviews about his former employer on various websites and forums. The comments explicitly suggested that the company was fraud and that it was simply taking its customers' money and never intended to deliver any work. Shortly after this Director left the company, its UK operation had almost died out. The telephone stopped ringing and current customers started to leave the company with various excuses.

This unexpected turn of events must have cost the Israeli IT company tens of thousands of pounds. It wasn't until one of the company's most loyal customers in the UK indicated that they wanted to terminate their £50,000 contract with the Israeli IT company, that the company discovered the mountains of bad publicity that they received on the internet search engines in the UK.

The managing director in Israel was astonished to find out how a relationship which turned sour with one disgruntled employee, had brought his company's UK operation to almost a complete halt. Eventually, the internet defamation lawyer who was hired by the company to save it from further reputational embarrassment, quickly managed to put a stop to the on-line reputation attacks against the Israeli IT company by its former employee and to quickly restore its online reputation.

The internet online defamation lawyer who acted for the company dispatched a strong legal letter to the former director who quickly proceeded to remove all the defamatory material from the internet. Had he not done so, the company would have had to apply to the High Court to obtain an injunction to force the removal of the defamatory material.

However, much of the damage to the company had already been done and following the swift action by their internet defamation lawyers, the Israeli IT company quickly managed to restore its UK client base and with further advice, started to create a rich online presence in the UK which would make it much harder for anyone in the future to attack it in such a way again.

Yair Cohen is a leading UK online defamation and internet solicitor. Yair is a partner with the niche internet law firm Bains Cohen. The firm is renowned for its innovative approach to resolving client's online reputation problems and for the exceptional level of client and customer care that it practices.
Yair Cohen is believed to be the first lawyer in the United Kingdom to have obtained court injunctions against Google, YouTube and other main internet service providers to force the companies to remove defamatory content from various blogs and websites. Yair's main strength is in his superior knowledge and understanding of the law in the context of the new realities which the internet presents. The secret to his success in removing defamatory websites is in his unique ability to combine vast amounts of technical knowledge with a unique and creative way of applying it to the law and to business reality.

Visit Bains Cohen Solicitors http://www.bainscohen.com/

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Online Reputation Attacks Could Be Significantly More Powerful When Videos Are Used

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Since taking over YouTube, Google appears to be on a mission to turn the internet into a multimedia medium and so are the other major search engines. It is believed that Google uses positive discrimination in order to encourage the use of video on the internet and as a result, it gives priority to video results which contain the searched keywords as well as to web pages which contain videos.

This means that online videos could be used as an explosive weapon by those who wish to harm your online reputation. Online videos can be optimized to obtain good placements without the search engines in exactly the same way that optimisation is done for a web page. In fact, some argue it is much easier to obtain high places in the search engines with videos than with web pages. At the moment, online videos remain a major reputational weakness for many businesses. But this weakness can be turned into strength very quickly.

As a tool to protect your online reputation against defamatory videos, if you make an early use of online videos, having at least 4 or 5 short ones, you will soon find that your business is found also on YouTube and on other websites which pick up videos from YouTube, but more importantly you will have created an important, yet simple and relatively inexpensive defence shield, which would make it more difficult for anyone else to penetrate. There are production companies out there which would create a series of 4-5 60 or 90 second videos for you from as little as £500.

If you don't want to spend any time on this, they can use images to create the videos or they can even speak to your customers and create a compilation of testimonials. For our purposes, having the videos out quickly is the most important thing. Later on, when you are ready to put together a more robust online video marketing campaign, you will be able to add to or even replace your initial videos with your latest Oscar Nominated production. The general rule is: "the more and the quicker, is the better."

Yair Cohen is an Internet Lawyer in the UK. Learn more about Internet Law and Online Defamation - http://www.bainscohen.com/

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Should Victims of Online Reputation Attacks And Online Intimidation Report To The Police?

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Victims of online reputation attacks and online intimidation should take their cases to the High Court instead of reporting them to the police.

In a recent court case where a hospital administrator became the first man in the UK to be jailed for stalking a woman by blogs, the authorities have sent a strong message to all those who wrongly believe that the internet is a lawless land where stalking, bullying, harassment, defamation and blackmail are a fair game and have demonstrated that online harassment shall not be tolerated in our society.

In a case which was heard by a Magistrate Court in Manchester it was alleged that a 38 year old man continuously attacked his female victim by using no less than 35 website blogs in which he repeatedly insulted her, causing her upset and reputational damage. The man also used emails to harass his victims as well as social networking sites such as Facebook.

It is not surprising at all that it took the authorities 18 months before the man was finally jailed. By this time, his victim must have been completely destroyed mentally and emotionally. Her confidence must have been shattered and her trust in people would have been replaced with cynicism and weariness. Had this hate campaign been conducted offline, I have no doubt that the authorities would have acted much quicker to bring it to a halt.

By the time the offender was jailed, he had already appeared in court on a number of occasions. On one occasion, after he admitted harassment, an order was made against him to refrain from mentioning his victim's name on any websites. Again, it appears it took some time before this very limited court order was made and even longer, before breaches were dealt with.

It is very likely, that had this been a case of domestic harassment, where more traditional methods of harassment were being used, the victim would have been relieved from her pain much, much earlier. It seems that the police, the Crown Prosecution Service and the Magistrates' Courts are not yet ready to effectively deal with these sorts of online harassment cases. The civil courts however are much quicker to act in response to online harassment cases with injunctions being granted within days rather than months and years. Victims of online harassment should be wise to take their cases to the High Court where solicitors can obtain a much more comprehensive injunction on their behalf within 48 hours. There is no need for victims of online harassment to suffer for such a long time before the harassment is stopped.

Despite him being jailed, large number of the defamatory blogs that the offender had created against his victim still remain active and is visible to the entire world to view. It is likely that a properly prepared High Court injunction would have ensured that the blogs and websites were removed by the internet service providers and that once such an injunction was granted, it could last for life, preventing anyone from taking part in the publication of material which is prohibited by the court order.

During his online campaign of harassment, the offender boasted of being so skilled in IT that he could set up and manipulate blogs about his victim quicker than they could be deleted.

It is not unusual for IT skilled individuals to blackmail their victims by making threats to destroy their victim's reputation unless certain demands being met. The police have seemed to so far, failed to recognise the fact that this form of blackmail is a criminal offence, mainly out of ignorance and lack of resources. These sorts of threats should be taken very seriously and perpetrators of such online threats should be told about the civil as well as the criminal implications of their actions.

Yair Cohen is a leading online defamation solicitor in the UK - http://www.bainscohen.com/.

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Online Providers of Legal Forms

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Legal websites offering a wide range of legal forms are ubiquitous on the Internet. Some legal websites specialize in specific legal areas while others offer different forms in a various areas of the law. Forms offered by various websites may vary in price and quality. Different websites also vary in terms of technical support provided to clients.

Consumers seeking inexpensive forms have to do comparative online shopping in order to obtain the best legal forms in terms of price and quality. Some forms are straightforward such as a car bill of sale which purpose is to buy/sell a vehicle. Such form is simple and easy to draft and may be purchased online without much reluctance. Other forms are more complicated in nature, content and length such as a release agreement. This type of legal form has to be professionally drafted by an expert in the field. It is therefore imperative to understand the risks involved in purchasing an online legal form. Some legal websites are in fact lawyers, law offices or law firms providing a service on the Internet as opposed to in person. The Internet growth gave rise to a whole new market. Lawyers and law firms recognized that they have to enter this new market to capture new clients. Accordingly, these legal institutions created legal websites in order to cater to new customers. Therefore, many of the legal websites are in fact virtual lawyers providing an online service.

Some legal websites offer fill in the blanks legal documents. These are ready made and professionally drafted documents that require clients to enter their information into the document. The legal document is downloaded and then saved on the customer's computer. Personal information can then be entered into the document on the computer and the document can subsequently be printed. Conversely, the document can be printed out and one's information can be manually entered by hand. This is the simplest type of an online legal document. Another type of online legal forms requires the customer to enter their information online before the document is downloaded. When downloaded, the document would contain all the information and is ready to be printed out.

Regardless of the type of online legal forms provided, it is imperative to select a professional online provider that offers a professional service and a quality product. As well, it is essential that the legal website provides an outstanding technical support for its customers which includes the ease of obtaining the service, the efficiency in downloading the document and the effectiveness in responding to customers' inquiries in a timely manner.

Online resource of business forms, estate planning forms, employment forms, lease agreements and family law forms.

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