Reputation Management / Online Defamation

"A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on."
Winston Churchill

If your business has received a misleading and incorrect online review there is action you can take to get the offending review taken down and in some case compensation can be awarded to cover you for any business losses.

As google reviews, feefo, Trustpilot and trip adviser dictate more and more where we spend our time and money they are increasingly important. Reputation is hard won but can quickly be lost, a bad online review can lead to consequential financial losses and affect future business opportunities.

Research suggests that over 85% of purchasers research the web for reviews and feedback before making a purchase and 70% of potential customers will not make an inquiry if they read negative mentions of a brand or company. In this era of socially driven content, review sites and citizen journalist it has become very easy to become a victim of negative comments from anonymous sources. These comments can come from unhappy clients, ex employees, Partners or Suppliers and even Competitors. The comments are often one sided, out dated, deliberately false, defamatory and/or lack context.

Negative comments and potential defamatory statements can spread often reaching tens if not hundreds of thousands of people. Active swift action is needed to avoid reputational risk to your Company including actively managing social media, forums, blogs, search engines and other websites for negative comments.

Once instructed we can help you to remove these reviews and get them taken down, it can go some way towards restoring your reputation if your case is managed properly and you get judgement in your favour.  In some cases compensation for any lost business will be awarded.

For a Defendant to be to be liable for defamation, they must be a publisher of the statement and this includes all those who published the statement including the primary publisher and secondary publishers. Every ‘Re-Tweet’ or ‘Share’ constitutes a fresh publication.

It is possible for an Internet Service Provider or website owner to be liable for the content of the sites which they host / own once they have been put on notice of the existence of the comments and they fail to act to remove the postings.

Our specialist solicitors are able to advise you in relation to a statement which has been published and to avoid the risk to your business. We can assist with the effective removal of the statement and protect your Companies reputation

Case Study

We recently acted for a property development company who had a development which failed. This left 100’s of clients with negative views about our Client which were posted on a variety of leading internet forums. The negative comments affected our client’s sales on other developments.  After gathering evidence of all the relevant defamatory postings we achieved complete removal of over 15 negative forum threads/blogs and over 100 other negative postings from other forums and websites.