Negative Review or Negative Person?
As an attorney, I’m ethically prevented from discussing a particular gripe with a particular client, even if that particular client decided to make their gripe public. To me, that’s like picking a fight with an old lady with no arms, but this is sort of my point about negative reviews: They tend to be written by negative people.
Take a look at my reviews. At the time I’m writing this, it’s July 2022 and I have more than 230 reviews and a 4.9 star average. Not too shabby, right? That means the overwhelming – and I mean absurdly vast – majority of my reviews are stellar (see what I did there?) reviews from happy clients. I think this translates into a safe assumption that, for the most part, I’m good at my job and tend to leave mostly happy clients in my wake.
Of course, I have a couple of negative reviews. The frustrating part about those negative reviews is that, unlike virtually every other business out there, I am FORBIDDEN from defending myself from whatever they say about me. I have a friend with a screen printing and retail business who got a negative review from someone saying they experienced “bad customer service,” but they were there for a job interview to which they showed up late! My friend was able to counter this review very effectively and demonstrate that this was just a disappointed troll taking out her life frustrations on an easy target with 0 consequences likely. I can run into this, too, but without the ability to explain anything to potential customers reading the clap trap written about me.
To address this issue, I thought I’d point out the two main themes I’ve seen in negative reviews that I and other attorneys get. So in pointing these things out, Mrs. Bar Investigator, I’m NOT discussing any client information; I’m relaying generic examples.
Not Hearing What They Want to Hear
Believe it or not, several of us have reviews from people that didn’t. even. hire. us. That’s right. Some wack-job can write a negative review about an attorney without having actually used their service, and potentially cost them thousands of dollars in revenue because of the negative perception. Thanks, internet! But I’ve seen it. Person calls, you tell them that they’ve got a situation you can’t help with and they would be better off calling someone else, and then BOOM sour grapes review. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to waste someone’s time, or my own, talking to a professional that has explicitly stated that they are incapable of helping me. And I sure as hell wouldn’t go complaining to the internet at large about ME calling someone who couldn’t help me and being mad about the truth I was told. Maybe I’m the crazy one, though.
Unreasonable Expectations
You just can’t satisfy some people. If you’re charged with speeding over 90mph, it’s probably not going to just go away, at least in the counties that I go to. You’ll be very lucky if I can save your driver’s license. Surprisingly, sometimes when I do just that – I SAVE SOMEONE’S DRIVER’S LICENSE FROM BEING REVOKED DUE TO THEIR OWN STUPIDITY – and then I get yelled at. Even more frustrating, I would never tell someone that I could make a ticket “go away” anyway. In fact, I have a very good idea how every ticket I handle is going to work out, and I normally share that – making NO guarantees – with clients before they hire me. So nothing that I do for a client is a surprise. But some people just have unreasonable expectations and/or gross memory deficit and/or hallucination issues.
If I don’t tell you what you want to hear, that’s not my fault. First, it’s your fault because you probably put yourself in this predicament anyway. Second, it’s also your fault because you called a professional and asked that professional for their professional opinion and decided to pout about it like a petulant child because it wasn’t what you wanted to hear. OK, maybe that second bit is also partially your parents’ fault, so maybe write them a review instead of trying to make me look bad on the internet. If I tell you what to expect, and then I do that, and then you’re mad at me for fulfilling the prophecy I already warned you about, you should not waste anymore time on the internet and you should talk to a physician of some sort. That’s not a problem I can fix.
I know I’m destined for a couple more negative reviews in my time. I plan on practicing at least for 5 more years, maybe more, and so it’s statistically probable that I’ll run into one of these jackanapes again. So when/if they write whatever hogs wallop they choose to write, uncaring as to the inappropriateness of the accusations against me or the financial consequences to me and my family, I’m going to reply with a link to this article because it is more likely than not that their issues fall into one of those two categories above (maybe both) and at least future clients can understand that, for the most part, my real clients who are not insane people like me and trust me to do a good job.