Fake Listings, AI Reviews… Where the Hell Is Google?

Episode Notes

Transcript

Gyi (00:00)

ahead. Where are you, Google?

 

Conrad (00:00)

Where the hell is Google? Like this is so imminently

 

identifiable, mountain view. It is so like we pieced this together with, you know, a bunch of people in a chatroom talking about a similar pattern. It’s not that hard. If I had a if I had a computer and access to the data, they like they know.

 

Gyi (00:19)

What if

 

you had one of the most advanced AIs ever created?

 

Conrad (00:23)

I know. I mean I

 

mean, they know and yet this is where we are. So my my bigger beef is with Google.

 

Gyi (00:28)

Well and again my here’s here’s my cynical

 

view. My cynical view here is that

 

Conrad (00:33)

Oh stop

 

Gyi (00:35)

they buy ads. These firms buy ads.

 

Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. I am Gyi from AttorneySync and I will be attending my alma mater’s homecoming football game tonight for Friday Night Lights.

 

Conrad (01:28)

That’s that’s high school I am I’m not a football guy, you know this. That’s a high school thing? Okay.

 

Gyi (01:31)

That is high school. Do I see

 

do I strike you as a college football athlete or professional athlete,

 

Conrad (01:35)

Well, you’re

 

Gyi (01:36)

Conrad?

 

Conrad (01:36)

Michigan would still be your alma mater. I was just making sure that they were not playing tonight and I didn’t know that.

 

Gyi (01:42)

I was not athletic, fast, or strong enough to play at the University of Michigan.

 

Conrad (01:48)

That’s that’s true. I’ve met you in person many times. I don’t you don’t look like you belong even as a kicker, and I mean that with all respect to kickers and yourself.

 

Gyi (01:55)

I I was much taller twenty years ago.

 

Conrad (02:00)

And I’m Conrad Saam from Mockingbird, and I have not received a speeding ticket since nineteen ninety-nine when I was at the University of Michigan Business School.

 

Gyi (02:11)

Okay. And do you recall how much over the speed limit you were going when you got this ticket?

 

Conrad (02:16)

Actually,

 

you know what? I didn’t even get the it’s before I went to Michigan

 

Gyi (02:20)

Okay.

 

Conrad (02:20)

and it was probably very fast. It was probably a well deserved

 

Gyi (02:24)

But we don’t just talk

 

Conrad (02:25)

ticket.

 

Gyi (02:27)

we don’t just talk about Conrad’s driving record and my high school football glory days. We talk about legal marketing. And Conrad, what are we talking about today?

 

Conrad (02:40)

So we have a great news section as all actually it’s a quick news section. A quick news section. And then we’re gonna get into kind of the dirty underbelly of the interwebs. We have not done this for a long time, but have recently there’s a been a lot of people talking about spam Google business profile listings that all track back to a single campaign.

 

Gyi (03:05)

Let’s do the news.

 

Conrad (03:16)

right, last news segment we talked about retirement of Dave Thomas from Law Tigers, and now we learn that Kate Nachazel is moving on from Fireproof. Congrats for your tenure as president of Fireproof. We’ll be watching to see what happens there.

 

Gyi (03:33)

I was gonna ask you, do we

 

do we know where Kate is going?

 

Conrad (03:36)

We don’t know where Dave or Kate are going. Maybe they’re doing something together.

 

How to Operate a

 

Motorcycle-centric Personal Injury Law Firm by Dave and Kate.

 

Gyi (03:46)

No, a motorcycle centric personal injury coaching program.

 

Conrad (03:52)

There you go. There you go.

 

Gyi (03:54)

In other news, as reported by Business Insider, Mark Liu isn’t a lawyer, but he knows how to build a tech startup.

 

Conrad (04:03)

Insert snark.

 

Gyi (04:04)

he is his startup, Arceus combines a law firm staffed by attorneys with software built to speed up contract review.

 

The company says it can shrink the time it takes to review a standard agreement from days or weeks to a few hours. If a review takes more than eight hours, it is free. That I’m gonna send him my law and contract and see if he can review it in less than eight hours. But you know, people be like, well, why is this relevant to lunch our legal marketing listeners? Again, this is this is a big law disruptor play. one of I guess they’re calling them at least business insiders calling them neo firms.

 

Conrad (04:44)

Neo firm. Again, that sounds like something

 

Gyi (04:45)

Neo firms

 

Conrad (04:47)

you put on a blister, Gyi.

 

Gyi (04:49)

he got he got they gave him t 17 million bucks to do this

 

Conrad (04:54)

Okay.

 

Gyi (04:54)

and good for him. And but you know, for listeners, you know, look, this is what’s out there in the marketplace, and next stop every law practice area. And so what’s my advice here? You know, so we talked about it a lot, we talked about in office hours.

 

You better do what the bots cannot because everybody’s getting their seventeen million bucks to do the bot thing.

 

Conrad (05:21)

In other news, Gyi and I are gonna be out and about. we’re going to be meeting up together for the last, maybe, Great Legal Marketing Conference in outside of DC with Ben Glass. Looking forward to that. I’m gonna be at the DC Bar as well. And I’ll also be speaking at the Washington State Bar. Are you chatting anywhere else, Gyi?

 

Gyi (05:42)

I’ll be chatting at the Minnesota solo and small firm event, I believe, but we will also I’ll be at ClioCon in Boston and I’ll be flying expediently across the country to meet you, Conrad, in San Diego for LEX Summit, where we’ll be broadcasting live.

 

Conrad (06:02)

Which will be great. I will see you there. I don’t know why, but I thought that was in Colorado and I am completely wrong. So I will see you in San Diego.

 

Gyi (06:09)

You actually thought

 

it was in Utah, but it is actually in San Diego.

 

Conrad (06:14)

All right. San Diego bound we are. And while we’re speaking about

 

summits, we should be remiss if we did not talk about the Lunch Hour Legal Marketing Summit, which has been announced. We’re having that in Austin. And I have learned that if you call the venue the Brazos, you’ll get pillaried by Texans who will inform you that it is not the long British A sound, but the Brazos, which is much more American.

 

Gyi (06:41)

You know, you’re learning a lot about Texas. I know last time you we were down there together, you put your hat down wrong and you’re having all sorts of trouble with Texas.

 

Conrad (06:48)

I

 

put

 

my hat down wrong. And I also learned that buying three three for one cowboy boots, not so comfortable after a day clunking around in them.

 

Gyi (07:00)

Take a break.

 

Conrad (07:02)

So Gyi, CallRail is kind of the de facto tool that almost all of our clients use. I believe almost all of your clients use as well, correct?

 

Gyi (07:10)

Absolutely, except the ones who object to call tracking.

 

Conrad (07:13)

those silly, silly firms that are hamstringing themselves. But you know, there’s so much that CallRail can do in terms of bringing call data in to CRMs really, really seamlessly. I think most of the major intake management software in CRMs have been able to hook into CallRail. So it makes that really, really easy. And the ability to hook CallRail to advanced artificial intelligence like Claude to start mining information that you get out of those inbound calls, invaluable.

 

Gyi (07:39)

Absolutely. You wanna know what the client’s journey looks like to finding you, what their pain points are, and do that seamlessly and to increase your ability to provide an excellent intake experience, you know, getting that call rail intake data directly into your CRM is a really powerful tool.

 

So go to CallRail dot com.

 

and tell them how much you

 

love Lunch Hour Legal Marketing and are so grateful that Lunch Hour Legal Marketing sent you to CallRail dot com.

 

Today’s show is sponsored by Eve Legal, the leading AI platform for plaintiff law firms.

 

Conrad (08:20)

Eve helps firms with both the practice of law and the business of law, with AI tools that dramatically cut the time it takes to produce casework. And Eve OS, the operating system for plaintiff firms that lets managers and firm owners answer any question about their business.

 

Gyi (08:35)

Over seventeen hundred plaintiff law firms use Eve to take more cases, reduce time on desk, and increase settlement values.

 

Conrad (08:45)

You can learn more at www.eve dot legal.

 

That’s www.eve dot legal.

 

Gyi (08:58)

And we are back. Conrad, I feel you should be leading this segment.

 

Conrad (09:04)

Why’s that Gyi?

 

Gyi (09:06)

Because you’ve done some fantastic legwork and I I would not you deserve to be get the scoop on this story here.

 

Conrad (09:15)

This is Gyi trying to step outside, step

 

Gyi (09:17)

Ha ha ha.

 

Conrad (09:18)

away from the target. Well, listen,

 

Gyi (09:20)

Dodging the bullets as they come.

 

Conrad (09:23)

let so we’re we’re gonna go over this. I’ll I’ll give the punchline really quick quickly. And it is not just me, but this this this has come up on on a bunch of discussion areas, bunch of private questions. there’s a firm, Alex Shunnarah or Shunnarah I’m not quite pronouncing that in incorrectly.

 

we found a massive widespread Google Business Profile spam campaign put on by Shunnarah And it started with a single listing. and the template is very, very straightforward. It very much looks like Google Business Profile listing. Here we go. We’re gonna look at one right now for those of you following along So the pattern is very, very easy to recognize.

 

It is a combination. The firm name is something like City plus either tracking lawyer or car accident lawyer. So City Plus plus practice area. They all have roughly 10 to 20 reviews associated with them, all of them five stars, all written within a one to three week time period. Most of those reviews are single reviews, right? So this is the one time, one and only time.

 

That this person has ever actually left a review. And when you click through to these pages, and it’s a generic firm, it is, it does not name the firm. One of two things happens. sometimes when you click, yes, and then we have the replete with bad AI video,

 

Gyi (11:14)

Sarah is recovered and relieved.

 

Conrad (11:16)

Well, so the key here is for those of you not looking at this on YouTube and just listening, the firm that Sarah is reviewing is not Shunnarah The firm name in this case was Mobile Car Accident Lawyer. Okay. And remember that. Yeah.

 

Gyi (11:30)

Well, it’s interesting because hold on a second. On their

 

the on the AI placard, on their AI brick wall, it says MCA lawyer. it’s short for mobile car accident lawyer.

 

Conrad (11:44)

There you

 

1. So we have MCA lawyer. and

 

The the the problem with this review, and like this, that’s a video testimonial, fine. There’s also, you know, 11 to 20 written reviews. They’re all reviewing this firm called Mobile Car Accident Lawyer. None of them actually reference Shunnarah. However, when you try to contact this firm from the Google Business Profile, one of two things happens. If you call them, you will directly go to Shunnarah’s intake system. Okay.

 

we’ve got a recording for that, which we can throw up. It’s actually up on the web. We there’s there’s a blog post. we’ll we’ll add that in the show notes. So that call goes directly to Shunnarah. If you click through, one of two different things happens. Number one, sometimes these clicks from you know city plus practice area, sometimes a click through will go to directly to an Alex Shunnarah website. In other cases, and this was the initial case, it goes to a very generic website.

 

Law firm website. Again, AI generated. No mention of a specific lawyer. No mention of any branding. We’ve got some generic white people in well fitting clothing. And that’s that’s as far as we get. Okay. But again, if you contact those if you call or if you fill out the form or if you text the firm, it all goes directly to Shunnarah. And so

 

This is, you know, clearly outside of Google’s best practices. and it it also raises a lot of concerns about especially the reviews. Gyi, you and I have been talking to a handful of law firm owners, fractional CMOs, in-house marketing people who kind of dealing with this. And that’s how we kind of piece this all together. I thought it was an isolated incident.

 

And then it the same pattern showed up hundreds of miles away. And these this range is we’ve seen stuff in New Jersey, we’ve seen stuff in Alabama, we’ve seen stuff in Louisiana. Like it is all over the place. It is not just kind of limited.

 

Gyi (14:11)

There’s Linda.

 

yeah, and in fact, Conrad, you can correct me if I’m wrong, but you you found this in thirty four states, this pattern?

 

Conrad (14:21)

Well,

 

Shunnarah has listings across thirty-four states. So w the the ha this is a manual process of actually trying to find this stuff. If you dig enough, you can find it. We actually found most of them by listening to other marketing people who were complaining about it. That’s where that’s where we got most of these examples from. But Shunnarah does have offices listed in 34 states. I don’t know, just to be clear, and so we’re very careful on our facts. I don’t know that we validated that there are

 

multiple versions of these templated kind of spam Google business profiles across all of those states. But we certainly found lots of

 

Gyi (14:58)

Yeah, and so we we know New Louisiana, at least two locations, Louisiana. We know Alabama, we know New Jersey. and again, so I’m gonna I’m gonna play a little bit of devil’s advocate here because that’s what I do.

 

Conrad (15:14)

No you’re not.

 

Gyi (15:15)

A lot of lawyers that I talk to, and in fact I was just having a conversation about this, they get a phone call from some marketing person, they get a spam email.

 

Or they meet somebody at a conference while they’re rubbing shoulders at the conferences, and lead generation bro approaches the lawyer and then say, Hey, look, we’re gonna make your phone ring. You don’t have to worry about anything, we’re gonna handle it. you’re gonna pay us per lead or per case, you know, whatever. And lawyer says, Sounds great. And lawyer’s thinking to themselves, you know, what could go wrong? I the phone’s gonna ring.

 

I’m gonna know that it’s from this lead generator source, but I’m not really I don’t really know what they’re doing to generate the lead. And so, you know, as far as I know, now you you might disagree with me here and be call me to task, which I be great, but maybe that’s what’s going on. Maybe the firm and the marketing people at the firm and the lawyers at the firm, they have no idea that this is going on. And they’re just, you know, they’re writing the check to pay for the leads.

 

Conrad (16:26)

I don’t believe that for a moment. neither do you.

 

Gyi (16:30)

Now,

 

let me let me just let me just make one point here. Just for people that are following along

 

Conrad (16:32)

Okay. You wanna backtrack?

 

Gyi (16:34)

at home, even if even if I’m right, and that’s true, the lawyers are ultimately accountable for what they’re paying the marketing people to do. And so it is not from an ethic, from a legal ethics, which this is clearly, I mean, I don’t know if we need to have a legal marketing ethics class here, but

 

Conrad (16:51)

And John

 

Henson.

 

Gyi (16:52)

Creating

 

fake reviews and assuming that Linda and Sarah are AI, which, you know, again, they seem like AI to me, but maybe they’re not. clearly false and misleading advertising. you know, I think it’s false and misleading advertising in general that there’s I mean, these addresses, one of them was like a I mean it’s not there’s there’s n there’s no law firm here behind it. none of the pictures are of the lawyers. They don’t have any of the disclaimers of the attorney responsible.

 

In fact, their terms and privacy policies are just there’s no page. It’s just a empty link. and obvious well, it’s

 

Conrad (17:27)

Well at least there’s a link. Here’s our terms.

 

Gyi (17:30)

a it’s a it’s a link back to the home page. And as you mentioned, it’s you know, again, not not to pick on Claude here, but it these are this is an obviously spun up Claude site, which again is another issue that’s going on out there is people are talking about like I can spin up a website for you overnight. cool. I hope it’s not this.

 

Because this is all sorts of problematic. So anyway, we say that. Now the the other thing that I wanted to point out that Conrad mentioned, you know, on first example here, went to that AI site. this example actually, just to click through so you can people can see it, does go to Birmingham Carrikson Attorney dot com. that is marketed as Alexander Shunnarah trial attorneys. And so clearly, at least

 

Conrad (18:15)

Th this is

 

from a Google perspective, that’s that’s against the Googles.

 

Gyi (18:20)

Again, so the well, you know, Google Google Google ain’t got time for this.

 

Conrad (18:22)

It is. No no

 

no no. Well that I mean we need to get into that. Where the hell is Google on all of this? Right?

 

Gyi (18:29)

Well,

 

and again, this is the same, you know, this came up at Case Status, and you know, my so people are like, what do we do about it? And I’m like, All right, well, you’ve got Google has a redressal form. There are communities of SEO spam fighters that try to work to take these down because again, just submitting this one time to Google is probably falling on deaf ears to a large extent. you can go to your state bar, which again

 

Under resource. They don’t have, they’re not the FBI here. They’re not doing the investigative journalism that Lunch Hour Legal Marketing is doing. And so largely that falls on deaf ears. State bars are gonna tell you, hey, look, we gotta we’re trying to protect clients from getting money stolen from them. We don’t have time to go and try to do whack-a-mole on fake Google business profiles. You can go to your state attorney general’s office, who again depend you know, some states that I I’ve actually seen some.

 

Press releases from state attorney generals talking about trying to fight back from a consumer protection standpoint. Yeah, you laugh. I I laugh too. you can go to the FTC. You can go to the FTC.

 

Conrad (19:38)

I mean yeah.

 

Gyi (19:41)

Report it to the FTC. What do you think? I don’t you know. Mm-hmm. Let’s be fair.

 

Conrad (19:44)

But so so Gyi, like to to be fair, to so how does one deal with this if

 

if one sees it in in in in their market, right? And

 

Gyi (19:54)

Well, you know, again,

 

Conrad (19:56)

but but some of these some of these listings have been taken down. I again I listened to the the chatter, some of them have been successfully taken down by being reported, correct? Yeah. So like

 

Gyi (20:05)

Mm-hmm. Yep. Yeah. Absolutely.

 

Conrad (20:08)

is it perfect? No. But is is is that is that that is your best mechanism? It is not

 

The state bar. Sorry, state bars. go.

 

Gyi (20:16)

No. No, I’ll tell you, you know what your best mechanism is? You

 

see this going on in your backyard. Get on the phone with your SEO company, your digital marketing company, or have your marketing director coordinate an effort to have these submitted to Google. you have to do it. Yeah, you gotta do it at scale. we’ll we’ll put a link to the redressal form, the report form in the show notes so that people can have this if they’re looking to do that. but get your community involved, get your community of lawyers, because again

 

You know, the ultimately who does this hurt? One, it hurts the legal services consumer because they’re relying on completely fabricated everything in making this decision. So, you know, even though it’s only nine reviews today, presumably over time as that grows, you’ve got people that are relying on this. So that that’s ultimately who it hurts the most. Tangentially,

 

it hurts the other lawyers who are competing in these markets. Now I’m not, you know

 

Conrad (21:16)

It it’s actually not the

 

other lawyers, it’s actually the lawyers because they’re not in these locations. Yeah.

 

Gyi (21:20)

It’s every law firm

 

yeah, it’s every law firm in market. and in fact I think that that is to me, that’s the r they’re they’re the ones with the most incentive. You know, look, and there have been cases about this where clients have you know, maybe they’re may maybe maybe we need a class action, but you know, tricky because you gotta like you gotta get clients who relied on these listings that hired these lawyers and under false advertising and then get a big group of them together and go file a class action.

 

That’s one app opportunity. but I think that the more realistic thing is is that the lawyers in these you this is supposed to be a self-regulating profession. We’ve got to hold firms to account that are engaged in these tactics. That’s where the pressure has to come from. And I, you know, a lot of and it’s funny because when we talk to various lawyers in these markets, you know, they were like, I had no idea this was going on. And I’m like, Really?

 

Conrad (22:17)

Well that’s I mean, Gyi, that’s one of the things. This is so w it’s so widespread. It’s so flagrant. This started about, I want to say I believe around three to four weeks ago. Why, why is this this has been quiet. No one said anything. None of the big agencies has I haven’t I haven’t heard anything about this. It’s surprising that we’re we’re we are the first people to openly talk about this after three to four weeks. Cause it is so widespread, right?

 

Gyi (22:44)

Yeah, and and I think the other the other thing is here is like, and I you know, I don’t know if this is true of this specific instance, but when we’ve seen lawyers behaving badly in the past, you know, a lot of times it’s like the the self governance governance aspect of the profession, it’s just not working. You know, sometimes maybe a lawyer will send a cease and assist. You know, and again, like I think about this, especially with all this money coming in.

 

You’d

 

think like some of these MSO firms that have you know massive budgets, massive,

 

Conrad (23:18)

Chad.

 

Gyi (23:19)

massive agencies backing them. you’d think that

 

Conrad (23:22)

What are you guys doing?

 

Gyi (23:25)

they would be all over this. And so you’re like, are is it is it because they’re referring cases to each other? Is it because they don’t want to upset the Apple cart? They don’t wanna cut you know, bite the hand that feeds them. You know, again, like small law firm that’s getting referrals from these firms.

 

You know, they’re like, I I I can’t, I’m not fighting this. and so again, for me, it’s gotta be the bigger players, it’s gotta be concerted effort, it’s gotta be the legal profession coming together and saying, Hey, this is not okay. We are I know. Well, again, we’ve been

 

Conrad (23:54)

Not gonna happen, dude. But like it j it just doesn’t happen. It’s I mean, we’ve been talking about this forever.

 

Gyi (24:00)

we we have been doing this for twenty years, and this is not the first time that something like this has come up. And again, I’m you know, we’re just this is one example.

 

you certainly don’t want to say this is the only time this has happened, but this has been going on for a long time. And you you and I’ve talked about this on the podcast many times. When is somebody do something? because again, it’s like are you are you relying on the you know, the couple of inside baseball law firm SEO companies to like handle trying to police Google business profile world and legal? Like, come on. And shame on Google, shame on Google.

 

Conrad (24:36)

I just like sh shame

 

on Google, shame on other agencies for not talking about this. It’s just weird. I want to come back to two other points though. just to to kind of flesh out that template. In so you know what to look for. In many cases, if you actually look for the actual building that’s listed, the AI imagery and the building, and and you can look that up, a cross reference that off off of Google Google Business Profile.

 

have nothing to do with each other, right? And and these are, you know, often in buildings that are kind of decrepit. You can just get that that that listing or a mailbox there. The other one is the mailbox thing. So a lot of these are are actually hosted, housed in a mailbox company, right? So these are spam tactics that were supposed to have been taken care of 10 years ago and yet they’re still effective. The other thing Gyi that you said was in your devil’s advocate perspective,

 

Maybe, maybe they just don’t know what’s going on. They’re buying leads from some smarmy lead vendor. I don’t buy it for two reasons. Number one, a firm of this size has to have the sophistication to have a very good understanding of where their business is coming from. And their business is coming to their own websites in many cases. And so and it goes directly into their intake. I’m not buying for a moment.

 

That they don’t know what is going on here. And to put the exclamation mark on that, this is on their own website. Alexander Shunnarah named Master of Marketing. it’s it’s a press release on their own page about from from trial lawyer magazine naming Alexander Shunnarah Master of Marketing. So like this is not a we didn’t know what was going on. me, my. Like they are very, very aware.

 

Gyi (26:25)

Well,

 

and again, I I I know I’m bending over backwards to play devil’s advocate here. you know, just because it’s branded, I was trying to see if we could get the it’s the registration is private, so we can’t tell who actually owns this domain. But you know, you say this is his website, Birmingham

 

Conrad (26:41)

Another signal.

 

Gyi (26:43)

Birmingham Birmingham Car Accident Attorney dot com. We don’t you know, I don’t know that he even knows this he might not know this site even exists. It’s branded as his site.

 

Conrad (26:52)

No,

 

no, I get that, but like there’s going to be at the very least, Gyi, a last click attribution model that they have for for this this widespread campaign. And if all of a sudden you get a bunch of business from something that you can’t identify, you figure out what that is.

 

Gyi (27:09)

Yeah, well he’s gonna they’re gonna be like it’s from his on his side of the table, he’s gonna say this is coming from the lead generation company. It’s funny, I’m reading so the you know, down at the bottom here, it’s location generic landing version 0.2 prepared by Longship. So maybe Longship is

 

Conrad (27:28)

Long long ship.

 

Gyi (27:30)

long I I think Longship is just the fake name that Claude came up with to give credit to the website company. But

 

I but constructively here, and aside from you know, just how do you get these things taken down? If you’re, you know, we’ve talked to lawyers, big players in the industry, that a significant part of their caseload is coming from lead buy purchasing, right? They’re buying leads. And so constructively, if you’re going to buy leads, it is your responsibility to know exactly what.

 

the lead generator is doing. You need to know what’s in the ad copy. You need to know where they’re going to be putting ads. You need to know what the landing pages look like. You have to have complete transparency because you are on the hook for what they’re doing.

 

Conrad (28:26)

Talk to John Henson if you’re buying leads because he’ll scare the crap out of you. But but Gyi, you do not believe that this is a lead buying thing. That you believe this. I I’m I this is that’s a question. Do you believe this is outsource? Yeah. In your opinion.

 

Gyi (28:36)

In my opinion, in my opinion, I you know,

 

the the truth is I don’t know, but it sure looks like this is something that this firm might know about. you know, especially I mean, again, very, very basic stuff, right? Like there’s links on this landing page here back to Shunnarah.com Are you s are you seeing this show up in your analytics traffic? Like refer.

 

Conrad (29:06)

This

 

is my point. They’re a sophisticated marketing company. There’s no way they don’t

 

Gyi (29:07)

Birmingham Car Accident Attorney dot com.

 

So yeah, and and by the way, my other my other hunches, real my real gut here, this is totally speculation, but you know, just my opinion. Someone’s probably already called him about it.

 

Conrad (29:25)

Yes.

 

Yeah. I I mean here well, here’s the other thing.

 

Gyi (29:28)

Will be my hunch.

 

Conrad (29:29)

You would have to be very oblivious at this scale to not know what is going on with your own firm. I just don’t buy it. We did, we did reach out to the digital marketing director at Shunnarah, offer offer to be on the on the pod, have an explanation, contribute or or refute or have have feedback on the the the blog post. We have not heard back.

 

Gyi (29:55)

Yes, and that’s a an open invitation to you know, if you want to have that conversation. Again, for me, like I’m I’m really it’s not like beat up. This is a this is a much wider spread problem than this particular firm. But we just feel compelled that someone’s gotta be talking about this. Like lawyers, if if you don’t know that this is going on in your backyard, you ought to know. And you should be talking to your marketing people about this issue.

 

and even though this is a particularly egregious example in my opinion, fake reviews, fake listings, AI testimonial avatars, AI lawyers who aren’t real. I mean, I just on Instagram and we can do the same thing on Instagram, we can do the same thing on Facebook, we can do the same thing on all these platforms. This is not good for legal services consumers, and people just don’t seem to know about it or aren’t willing to talk about it.

 

Or I don’t know, but this is not this is not good.

 

Conrad (30:58)

We try and leave on an upbeat note. I’m not sure we can.

 

Gyi (31:03)

Well,

 

the upbeat note is is that there are lawyers out there who actually do care and they don’t and they don’t think that this is okay. And there are movements across the country to push back on this. I know I’ll give a shout out to Travis Patterson in Texas, who is calling for getting rid of lead generation in Texas. Obviously, Colorado has ended lead generation.

 

For lawyers, Illinois and California are trying to do things to mitigate it. So the the positive here is that there are people trying to push back, but it is gonna be an uphill battle. And again, you know, we had we’ve had many conversations about this that have fallen on deaf ears. but ultimately to me too, there has to we have to find a way.

 

To hold these platforms accountable somehow. And you know, I get section two thirty and all this kind of stuff and all the advantages, but they’re they’re the ones that if you report this, they it should be very easy for them to identify this and to take these downs, take these down and punish, because again, Google has all sorts of tools to punish. But if you can see this, like why not a manual action on the main website? You know, we we know in the past. Go ahead. Where are you, Google?

 

Conrad (32:17)

Well, so this is this is my bigger point. Where the hell is Google? Like this is so imminently

 

identifiable, mountain view. It is so like we pieced this together with, you know, a bunch of people in a chatroom talking about a similar pattern. It’s not that hard. If I had a if I had a computer and access to the data, they like they know.

 

Gyi (32:39)

What if

 

you had one of the most advanced AIs ever created?

 

Conrad (32:42)

I know. I mean I

 

mean, they know and yet this is where we are. So my my bigger beef is with Google.

 

Gyi (32:47)

Well and again my here’s here’s my cynical

 

view. My cynical view here is that

 

Conrad (32:52)

Oh stop

 

Gyi (32:54)

they buy ads. These firms buy ads.

 

Conrad (33:00)

With

 

that, we’re gonna leave you

 

Gyi (33:00)

Why w what’s good w with that?

 

Conrad (33:03)

because we’re tr I keep trying to bring this back to something positive. I think we’re just gonna have to leave this turd in the middle of the floor and see what happens.

 

Gyi (33:13)

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. If you just landed here and have no idea what any of this is about, please subscribe to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing wherever your favorite podcasting apparatus is. Until next time, Conrad and Gyi, farewell from Lunch Hour Legal Marketing.

 

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