Reputation Repair: What To Do When A Bad Review Hits Google

Reputational damage can derail a business in the blink of an eye. When that damage comes in the form of an online review, content moderation policies can make it difficult to remove even deeply unfair reviews. For law firms, meanwhile, professional ethics can make it difficult to address the substance of any review, positive or negative, with specificity. These challenges, combined with the central role online reviews often play in attracting potential clients, make developing a comprehensive strategy for effectively handling negative reviews on sites like Google and Yelp an essential part of your law firm marketing plan.

“The Yelp Effect” – Why Good Lawyers Get Bad Reviews

If you have ever worked a job in customer service, you know: The happy customers are not the ones you hear from the most. They are usually also not the customers most determined to work their way up the chain of authority until they feel they have made their displeasure known to the appropriate parties (or they parties they consider appropriate, which may or may not be the same thing). Dissatisfied customers are disproportionately motivated to express themselves: Students who loathe a professor are more driven to complete their course evaluations, customers unhappy with their orders are especially inclined to leave detailed reviews on sites like Amazon, people with horror stories of tech malfunctions are prone to venting their frustrations to the customer support staff.

Balancing Selection Bias and Genuine Usefulness

Researchers call this type of selection bias “the Yelp effect,” after the digital review platform, but the Yelp reference is just a convenient handle because Yelp provided an early place to see concentrated samples of the phenomenon in action. The frustration of the Yelp effect, of course, is that both good and bad reviews really do have an important role to play in informing other potential clients and customers, and yet the “human nature” element means that the distribution of good to bad reviews can often present a distorted picture of even the most well-run business.

Yelp, Google Reviews, and Digital Word of Mouth

Traditionally, law firms have relied heavily on word-of-mouth to grow their practices. While some attorneys have seen success in growing their practices through billboards, mass media (television or radio) advertisements, and even print ads, for many law firms with a smaller marketing budget or a more niche area of practice, earned reputation is the keystone of their strategy for attracting new clients.

The Digital Grapevine

Often word of mouth is literal: One person who has a legal concern speaks to a friend who has dealt with a similar issue and asks the friend for thoughts on local attorneys. These days, however, online review platforms perform a double role, combining the searchable benefits of old-school Yellow Pages with the human perspective of personal reviews. Although the National Trial Lawyers Association (NTLA) hosts a reprint of a 2014 article from The Maryland Daily Record noting that the more than 75% of individuals seeking legal services who start their search with online review platforms strongly favor Yelp, in more recent years the integration of Google Reviews with Google My Business on one side of the equation and Search on the other has given that company a significant edge in review generation and readership.

Implications for Law Firm Growth

What this means for law firms, especially those seeking to grow their practice organically, is that any “tilt” in public reviews, regardless of platform, can have an outsized impact on a firm’s long-term health. Many attorneys who recognize this truth nonetheless find themselves struggling to navigate the adverse effects of even a few negative reviews effectively.

Reporting Inappropriate Reviews

If your law firm receives a negative review on Google Business or another review platform, one of the first things you should assess is whether the review meets the platform’s standards. Google, Yelp, and other similar review tools all have their own content policies and terms of service, but as a general rule most of them allow for even very harsh reviews of products, services, or customer treatment; personal attacks, fraudulent reviews, and “coordinated” activity, on the other hand, are frequently considered out-of-bounds and subject to removal.

Review the policy of the platform where the negative review has appeared (Google’s content policy covers reviews appearing on Maps as well as on an organization’s Business Profile listing) and check to see whether the review demonstrably violates any of the listed guidelines. If so, you may be able to get the review removed for a terms of service (TOS) violation, limiting your need for further damage control. Keep in mind that although Google says their review of these reports “typically takes several days,” some platforms may use automated systems as a screening tool for initial reports; be prepared to submit an appeal if you are convinced the content constitutes a blatant violation, and particularly if it uses abusive or threatening language.

Responding to Legitimate Complaints

Sometimes your law firm will inevitably have clients who are not fully happy with the outcomes of their cases, for a variety of reasons. Google and other review platforms are likely to treat negative reviews that complain about your law firm’s results as legitimate, whether the complaints are reasonable or not.

Recognizing Limitations Specific to Law Firms

Lawyers often feel that they are at something of a disadvantage in responding to reviews of this type, since attorney-client privilege will typically limit the specificity with which they can publicly address the particulars of the situation. That said, marketing professionals generally agree that it is nonetheless “best practice” to respond promptly, in some form, within 48 hours of the initial review’s appearance on your Google Business Profile.

Monitoring Services

Keeping track of newly posted reviews may be a job you can outsource to a digital marketing agency; some offer specialized reputation management services, while others fold Yelp or Google Reviews monitoring together with services like social media management or email scheduling. Whether you handle incoming reviews personally or not, you may find it helpful to consult regularly with a marketing professional regarding your law firm reputation management strategy and how your developing review history contributes to your firm’s digital profile.

How To Structure an Effective Response

You may also want to confer with your marketing team before posting a public response to a negative Google Business review, to make sure that you are on the same page. In general, however, most marketing professionals agree that the following tips can be expected to apply in most circumstances:

• Aim for a response within the first 1-2 days after the review is posted.
• Start by expressing appreciation for the feedback you have received (even if you don’t appreciate it and think that the reviewer is completely out of touch).
• If the reviewer has identified specific issues, address those directly, to the extent that you can do so without compromising client confidentiality.
• Invite the reviewer to connect with your office directly to discuss possible options for resolving their complaint.

In some cases, there may not be a “resolvable” complaint. For instance, maybe the client just wants to express their dissatisfaction with the tone of their interactions with your law firm’s office staff, or perhaps the client is actually complaining about the law that applies to their case.

Addressing Steps Taken

If the reviewer is complaining about something your law firm can reasonably change, such as the client intake process or the turnaround time for responding to client emails and phone calls, your response to the review can be a chance to show that you are taking the feedback seriously. This demonstration may be easier if you had some advance “warning” of the client’s dissatisfaction from one or more interactions with them, prior to seeing the review; often, although by no means always, there are indications over the progress of a case that the client is unhappy with their experience.

Addressing Your Secondary Audience

Even if you are completely blindsided by the specific complaints made, however, you can take the opportunity to speak with any members of your team who were involved in handling this client’s case to get their perspective on the claims made, and formulate a quick series of steps your law firm can take to avoid giving rise to in the future. Post your response, identifying these steps and letting the reviewer know you have made changes in response to their feedback. Even if the reviewer never changes their mind or updates their review, your “real” audience here is going to be the people who read the review and form their impression of your law firm based not just on the client’s complaints, but on how your team has handled them.

Mitigation: Counterbalancing the “Yelp Effect”

You obviously cannot control what your former clients write. In most cases, you likely would not want to try; you just wish people would more reliably leave reasonable assessments of the services you have provided for them! However, because your “star” ratings, and the cumulative impression created by written reviews, will be created from the totality of all reviews and ratings left for your law firm by all clients, often one of the most effective steps you can take to mitigate the negative impacts of a few bad reviews is to develop a comprehensive strategy for soliciting reviews across the board.

Taking the Bad With the Good

Some attorneys may be tempted to think, “Won’t that net more bad reviews, too?” The answer is a careful “yes, but”: While actively soliciting reviews will probably increase the absolute number of reviews of all kinds, the purpose of this “counterweight” approach to reputational damage control is not to reduce the total number of negative reviews, but to dilute their impact by collecting a more realistic sample of your clients’ opinions.

Asking for Input: Strategies for Law Firm CRM

Law firms have multiple options for soliciting reviews, but for delivering competitive results at minimal cost, email is hard to beat. You will likely want to use a slightly different approach depending on whether your relationship with a particular client is based on handling a single, relatively self-contained legal matter vs. part of an ongoing retainer.

Actively Solicit Feedback

For a client with whom you have a retainer arrangement, then a personalized email confirming that all is going well a few days after you have successfully handled a matter of concern to them, may be appropriate. Let them know you value their feedback and would appreciate an honest review. For clients with whom you have worked on a one-time matter, a follow-up email is generally still appropriate, but these clients may be more attuned to the relative “distance” implied by a “form” message with limited personalization. Include their name, a reminder of your willingness to hear from them if they have any questions, and a request for their honest feedback.

Make Reviewing Your Law Firm Easy

Regardless of the structure of your relationship with the client, it is critical to include an active link directly to the URL where they can enter their review; the rates of attrition grow higher at every added click, so you want to make a point of minimizing steps. Along the same lines, ideally you would focus on a single platform. Google Reviews is a solid choice for most law firms, but there can sometimes be local variations that shift the balance, so you may want to discuss strategy with a digital marketing professional to make sure that Google Reviews is actually the platform that makes the most sense for your local market. A marketing professional will in many cases be able to advise you concerning how to “advertise” reviews on your website and in social media, as testimonials.

Don’t Sleep on the Value of Expertise

As an attorney, you already know that no one person can be an expert in all areas. If you had a legal case outside your own practice area, you would seek advice from an attorney experienced in handling matters similar to yours. The same basic principle applies to questions of reputation management: When in doubt, consult a professional law firm marketing agency. Some digital marketing agencies do offer crisis communication services, but you don’t have to wait for a truly “bombshell” negative review to hit Google before you seek a consultation. Take proactive steps to work with digital communication specialists, and make collaborating with these professionals an integral part of your ongoing reputation management strategy.

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Annette Choti, Esq., has over two decades of legal experience and is the Founder & CEO of Law Quill, a concierge legal marketing agency for law firms.  Annette authored the bestselling book Click Magnet: The Ultimate Guide To Digital Marketing For Law Firms, hosts the popular Legal Marketing Lounge podcast, and founded Click Magnet Academy where she teaches professionals to leverage the powerful LinkedIn platform. As a sought after speaker for Bar Associations, Legal Associations, and Marketing Conferences, Annette provides legal marketing insight along with an entertaining twist. Annette used to do theatre and professional comedy, which is not so different from the legal field if we are all being honest. Annette can be found on LinkedIn or directly through email at [email protected]