John Tatz Takes Position at Owens & Perkins PC

Congrats to attorney John Tatz on accepting a position at Owens & Perkins PC in Scottsdale. An experienced criminal trial attorney, John will be handling criminal matters for the growing Scottsdale firm.

John is one of the nicest people I have ever worked with and I wish him well in his new endeavor.

Kristen Martin - Phoenix Family Attorney

Congratulations to attorney Kristen Martin on being named partner at her firm. Formerly Bishop Law Offices, the new firm is called "Bishop & Martin" and is already reflected on their award winning website. The firm will continue to focus exclusively on divorce and family law.

Identifying Plagiarism Online and Why it Matters

I was extremely disappointed to find that a local criminal defense lawyer, who we will call attorney x, had stolen content on his site.* The site takes liberally from many sites, but his criminal page is a word for word copy of William Foreman's site. The theft is so blatant that the last paragraph still includes Bill Foreman's name;

"No matter how serious the situation, William Foreman is a skillful and effective Phoenix criminal lawyer who will respond to the needs of each client"

Finding the offending content was easy. I just typed Bill Foreman's url into http://www.copyscape.com/ and it told me that attorney x's criminal page included 326 words of copied content. But how do we know who copied who? Besides the obvious Bill Foreman reference, there are a number of ways to establish who had the content first. One is by checking sites like the WaybackMachine http://www.archive.org/index.php where you can input any url and see what a site used to look like and when it was last updated. Doing this for attorney x we see that his website used to be a Lawyers.com template that was updated in September 2007 . (curiously just 4 months after I presented to attorney x and showed him examples of my sites - including Bill Foreman's). Doing the same for Bill Foreman, we see that his content was originally added to his site in 2004.

Why Website Plagiarism Matters
Plagiarism matters for a number of reasons. For one, the existence of duplicate content can be detrimental to your rankings in the various search engines. This is because search engines care deeply about search experience! Having two exact results show up for the same query would undermine that experience and may impact the likelihood of a repeat searcher. Therefore, Google, MSN and Yahoo all work hard to scrub the results for duplicate content. In fact many of their pending patent applications involve ways of detecting duplicate content on the web. While I am confident that the search engines can determine who had the content first, there have been instances where the original content has been wrongfully penalized. This is one reason plagiarism is not tolerated at FindLaw and is considered a fireable offense for our content writers.

For attorneys, unauthorized plagiarism is also a matter of ethics. Lawyers are expected to uphold a higher standard of ethical behavior and the great majority of them do. One wonders what would happen if a law student turned in a plagiarized paper? I do hope that attorney x did not add this content himself. I also hope that he takes down the offending content immediately. *

My website clients make a significant investment in their content, in both time and money. I feel an obligation to help protect that investment. I also think its important to protect our writers. Creating search engine friendly content that also provides a great user experience is an art that our content writers take great pride. Therefore, I have created a "duplicate content" section on my BLOG in which I will identify blatant examples of plagiarized content moving forward.

*At 9:26 am on December 22nd I checked the site and found that the offending content was taken down by attorney x. My purpose of posting this information was not to damage an attorneys reputation, but rather to illuminate a very important problem that has the potential to really hurt my client. If a web designer supplied this content, I think its important that we learn who it was so that other Arizona lawyers do not fall victim to plagiarized content.

Holiday Season Traffic Dips

In the last few weeks I have had many website customers inquire about dips in traffic to their firmSites. One significant contributing factor to traffic dips during this time of year relates to the holiday season and the impact on internet traffic.

As an example of this effect, FirmSite traffic during Thanksgiving week dropped 27% over the week prior, a figure that is consistent with both 2007 and 2006 Thanksgiving week traffic drops. While Thanksgiving week usually only affects one week of traffic, the end of the year and new year holidays are typically more pronounced and sustained, with drops the three weeks leading up to the holidays, capped off by a significant drop the week of the New Year holiday. Full traffic patterns historically resume during the 2nd week of January.

The traffic drop is even more acute for family law websites. This is likely due to the fact that families try to hold it together during the holidays, starting the divorce process only after the holiday season is over.

Marketing Myth #8 Will clicking on your own site improve your rankings?

I have actually gotten this question a number of times from lawyers. In fact I have seen a number of law firms set their website as the home page for each computer in the office, in the mistaken belief that this will somehow influence the ranking of the site. It does not. While the number of visitors to a site is a factor in determining Google's page rank, Google is certainly aware of where those clicks come from. While clicking on your site, won't hurt ranking, it will badly skew your traffic reports and is why I recommend against it.

New Google Wiki Search

If you have been searching in Google recently, you may have noticed arrows to the right of the search results. This is a new feature called Search Wiki, which is only visible if you are signed in to your Google account. Search Wiki allows you to customize your search result - allowing you to promote or demote certain results. It also allows you to make annotations for each result. For example if you prefer a certain airline approved pet carrier over others, you can make sure that it always comes up first- and you can make notes like - (site carries multiple brands of carriers and offers carriers for small and large dogs etc...).

My colleague Tucker Carney offers a much better technical explanation in his Los Angeles lawyer marketing BLOG. One word of caution, this capability will make it easy for unscrupulous sales people to manipulate search results - perhaps showing how their directory comes up number one for a certain keyword term. Therefore, you need to insist that all representative searches are done when NOT logged into Google.

Arizona Republic Misquotes Phoenix Family Lawyer - Angela Hallier

In Monday's edition of the Arizona Republic, Angela Hallier was badly misquoted. The Arizona Republic article claims to use an quote from Angela's website, making it appear that she encourages clients to manipulate their kids.

In her "Ask Angie" column on hallierlaw.com, she offers "naughty and nice" holiday advice for not-so-jolly couples.

"Put a naughty twist on the holidays by telling your child that you pay so much in child support and/or spousal maintenance that you don't have any money to buy the gifts they want; or tell your child that the other parent doesn't pay their support the way they're supposed to, so the holidays just won't be what they used to be. . . . Better yet, ask your child to ask the other parent for the money they owe you. Tell them if they don't collect, there won't be anything under the tree."

What truly awful advice. This could not have possibly come from a family law attorney, and it didn't! After looking at Angela's website its clear that the quote was completely taken out of context. In the original web posting, seen here, it is clear that Angela is showing what not to do - hardly condoning the behavior. I hope the Arizona Republic corrects this error as it really puts this attorney in a bad light.

Justin Beresky & Geoffrey Fish - Maricopa County Criminal Defense Results

One of the most aggressive criminal defense firms in Phoenix, Beresky & Fish, has had a stellar year in regards to results. Lead attorneys Justin Beresky and Geoffrey Fish are both experienced trial attorneys who regularly win in the courtroom. More importantly, the hard work they do before trial has led to a slew of dismissals. Here is a partial list of their recent criminal defense victories.


CR2007-030253-004 Possession for Sale Dismissed on 1/24/08

CR2007-006452-001 Leaving the Scene of a Dismissed on 1/28/08
Fatal Accident

CR2007-151655-002 Trafficking in Stolen Property Dismissed on 3/24/08

CR2007-166714-003 Armed Robbery Not Guilty at trial on 4/02/08

CR2007-156025-001 Theft Not Guilty @ Trial on 4/21/08

CR2007-006589-001 Misconduct Involving Weapons Dismissed on 4/25/08

CR2007-016220-001 Theft of Means of Transportation Dismissed on 5/06/08

CR2008-122126-003 Human Smuggling Dismissed on 5/24/08

CR2006-009085-001 Agg. Assault by Prisoner Dismissed on 6/16/08

CR2006-174206-001 Aggravated Assault Dismissed on 6/30/08

CR2008-006593-002 Agg Assault & Armed Robbery Dismissed on 10/16/08

CR2008-121607-001 Agg. Assault Dismissed on 10/23/08

CR2003-013126-001 Criminal Damage Dismissed on 11/08/08

CR2004-016036-001 Possession of Dangerous Drugs Dismissed on 12/01/08

CR2007-007789-001 Agg. Assault Dismissed on 12/01/08

CR2008-006974-001 Auto Theft Not Guilty @ Trial on 12/3/08

Gilbert AZ Luxury Home For Sale $675,000

This spacious 5BR/5BA basement home in Gilbert's luxury Vintage Ranch neighborhood is perfect for families with children, and features all of the amenities you expect from a luxury Fulton home. The 4523 sq feet home sits on a large 12,862 ft lot in one of Gilbert's most sought after neighborhoods.

Interior Features; Central Air, Family Room, Pets Allowed, Walk-In Closet, Den/Office, Laundry Room, Fireplace, Appliances, Main Floor Bathroom, Pantry, Basement, Main Floor Bedroom. Exterior Features:Landscaping, Deck/Patio, Grill/Barbeque, Fenced Yard. Community Features:Recreation Facilities.

The house also features a 119 inch HD home theater system. Perfect for entertaining. For more information please contact Joe Triano on his cell 480-227-7162 or email joe.triano@gmail.com Joe is a realtor for Prudential Arizona Properties.

Solomon & Relihan Wins Arizona Design of the Month for November!

Congrats to Solomon & Relihan for winning this BLOG's design of the month award for November. The award will be memorialized with a permanent link on the design page of my Arizona lawyer marketing website.

The beautiful new site was designed by Jeff Lavallie. This is Jeff's second win, having won the award in October for Parson & Goltry's intellectual property website.