Warning - Mixing Yellabot & Lawyer Review Sites

Sorry to hear it. This is one of those unintended consequences of marketing like you did. With lawyers, obviously, you should keep your nose clean.

Wrong niche to choose. Dont mess with the lawyers...

Perhaps, you shouldn't be putting up automated pages/sites and not having a clue as to what is on them.

Stealing data from yellow pages and adding 6k pages within a half hour or so is not adding anything of value to the internet.

Man, that sucks.

Have you talked to a lawyer at all? Have you talked with the lawyer who's suing you at all, or did you just get a letter in the mail? Do you have any idea about what's gonna happen, or is it still totally up in the air at this point? I guess you did just post this today...I'm always curious when I read about legal stuff like this.

Either way, eff that guy! What a jerk.

I'll be rooting for you!

Kindly,
- Stephen

It could be worse: You could have Yellow Pages coming after you for flogging their content.

You called the lawyer a parasite. But in all honesty, and I may be the only member of the Warrior Forum that believes this, when you use software to automatically take data from sites that you do not own and create thousands of pages that you do not know what is on them, then you are the parasite.

Despite what most people think, lawyers have a strict code to follow when advertising. Without knowing the specific facts, it may be that what you put together looks like lawyer advertising and may have subjected lawyers to possible discipline by the state bar.

It may be like another warrior suggested, the photo may make it look like the lawyer is young and inexperienced.

Or it may be something else.

Bottom line is that I think that there is a lot more in play than a lawyer trying to get money from you.

Thank you for sharing.

so what was the outcome of the court date.

hey everyone, I received a few messages about the outcome of my case with this lawyer, so I thought i would post the latest.

Well we did meet in small claims, and before we would get our chance appear in front of a judge, we were asked if we would like to talk it out in mitigation prior to appearing before the judge. We both agreed.

So we went over to this room and were both given a chance to speak our side to the 2 mitigation specialists that were assigned to our case. The lawyer went first, then I went second.

As I expected, this lawyer was early 30's and was afraid of his own shadow. Very meak and timid and went on to tell his story of how he came across my website with "HIS" info page and how when he saw the site of him and his info and the picture of the young boy next to it....well he suffered extreme emotional distress when he saw that info. He felt that he should be awarded $1,500 for that distress.

He went on to claim that I had posted egregious incorrect info of him and he felt that that was a case of libel.

So now it was my turn and I printed out the stats for my site showing this lawyer that his page only received a few hits....and those were hits from himself actually looking at his site info. I reassured him that the page of him had been taken down as soon as I received the papers that were served to me by the court.

Prior to getting served, I had no knowledge of his page even existing, let alone having that picture of the young boy next to it. Anyway, after I told him that the page was taken down and he also acknowledged the fact that he also checked the page and agreed that the page was no longer online...he felt a little better.

In addition, I began to tell him that his site was created with software and that I had no interest in harming him or his reputation and therefore my intentions were innocent and I had no malice toward him to come to the conclusion of libel. Furthermore, his info was scraped from the yellowpages and anything taken from yp was already put up there by someone other than me.

Well after an hour of discussions, and the fact that this guy was about to cry and breakdown, and also fearing that the judge would take the lawyers's side, I wanted this case to go away. So I offered to pay him $500 and have this not go before the judge and make it go away. The lawyer agreed. He perked right up and was all smiles now. He just made $500 for no work.

And so I paid him and we went our separate ways. Yeah this left a really bad taste in my mouth and yeah maybe I should've fought it in front of judge, but I figured that I was gonna lose and felt $500 was better than $1,500 plus any other fees he accumulated as a result of the lawsuit. Ugh.

Thanks for posting this update, I didn't intend to be a pest when I PM'd you, I was concerned about your situation and knew there were other's who felt the same way.

From reading your post, I interpret that all things considered, you are not too dissatisfied with the outcome, I hope.

If you don't mind me asking (and if you just want this thread to go away I understand), would you have gone into this arbitration meeting with a different mindset or not at all if you had known about the Australian case involving Telstra or were you already privy to that knowledge.



Love,
Marcia

Yeah, thanks for the update Tyler. Nothing worse than getting sued by an attorney. At least he wouldn't have been able to sue you for his lawyer fees, lol.

Well, I know it's not really my business to do this but if it's any consolation, I'd be happy to do some small part in helping you recover your losses by donating any one of my products you don't already have, free of charge. I can't remember what all of my products you already own. Sounds like you have YellaBot and EZ Empire Builder, at least. Shoot me a PM and I'll be happy to hook you up.

My guess is you wouldn't have had to pay anything if it went in front of a judge but, at the same time, it's wise to go with your gut. My instincts are rarely wrong, in the moment, as I'm sure is true of you, as well. You really can't go wrong by trusting your instincts. At the end of the day, you have an interesting story to tell and at least it goes to show that sites like this can and do draw the attention of the business owners.

One thing people are doing a lot is building EZ Empire Builder business directories, tossing a little SEO at their site, quickly outranking the companies for the company name and then using that as a foot in the door to sell adspace and local business services, like google places ranking services, web design, SEO, social media management, mobile marketing, etc etc. It's an amazingly successful way to get your foot in the door with a local business.

So, to make things easier for people, I am currently building out a research tool that runs reports on all the business listings generated when you use EZEB to build the directory.

If your directory has 300 listings of doctors in San Francisco, it runs a bunch of reports for each business... for things like backlinks, google places rankings, onpage SEO, online repuation (ie., number of poor ratings on Yelp, Google places, etc)... tons of reports.

Then, with a little SEO, you end up outranking the business, the whole goal being to outrank just for their biz name.

With that, you can call them up and let them know, "hey, it took me 15 min of work to outrank you on Google... can I have a few min of your time to show you why it was so easy?"

You look at the reports, see what services the company is MOST in need of and pitch them that one single service while on the phone. If it's a local business to you (ie., if you live in San Francisco), then you shoot for an in person meeting so you can show them the sexy visual reports which helps close the deal. One of my associates has been doing this successfully for a long time and we're working on it together and hope to have it out the door this year.

Anyway, sorry to go off on a tangent.

And thanks again for taking the time to post your outcome for all to read. I hope your situation didn't get in the way of your direction and what you were doing online.

Cheers.

Wow I think I would have produced log files with his IP and flipped the script!

Counters are ALWAYS cheaper than original filings and bury him with intensive interrogatories!!!

Please help me understand why you signed for the letter?

Good luck with Yellabot - I've put in 3 support tickets and 3 or 4 emails over 4 weeks and not had a single reply. Great product if you never need support.

I just go through the post. it's really helpful and informative. Thank you for sharing such a nice information.

That incident must have surely left a bad taste in your mouth. Thankfully it is over and you didn't have to shell out a huge sum of money.

By the way, I would like to know whether you are making nice profits through these sites created from Yellobot?

How are you monetizing the sites? How much average visitors do you get per site in a single day?

There are other threads about working with lawyers. Don't! These people are ruthless. Sorry for your troubles

This is one of the dumbest ideas I have seen. You're incredibly lucky it was only one lawsuit and only $500. Most attorneys would have served you in Superior Court with a $25k minimum. None of this small claims business.

Instead of calling the lawyer a parasite and ripping him, you're the one scraping content, creating a crapola site, and placing misleading and deceptive pictures next to fake reviews.

.

I'm sorry for posting on an old thread but considering the evergreen nature of forum posts and some negative comments, I wanted to clear my name here... YellaBot support is solid. Like any online product we have had our ups and downs finding quality support representatives but for some time we have had an extremely high level of support.

Our last 60-days report on zendesk is 100% satisfaction which I hope says a lot.

http://yellabot.com/images/zendesk-5-12-2015.png

Apologies to anyone who has experienced anything but the best possible support in the past. Just keep in mind that forum threads are often one-sided. As a vendor of a product, we are not always able to see what is being said around the whole web.

That said, if anyone has any issues in the future, please don't hesitate to message me here on WF directly and I will be more than happy to assist you.