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Eyes Widen as Above the Law Blogger Attends NALP Panel on Online Rumor Mills

By Martha Neil

May 1, 2010, 12:01 am CDT

Fellow attendees stared at him as though he had three heads and vampire fangs when he went to a National Association for Law Placement program this morning on navigating online rumor mills, says Above the Law blogger Elie Mystal.

But there is no silver bullet that can kill the insider gossip routinely reported on the self-described tabloid legal blog: “If a law firm leaves an information vacuum, someone will fill it. So get your information out, and get it out early. Truth is the only antidote available to law firms,” writes Mystal in an Above the Law post on the program tonight.

The NALP program provided helpful information to law firms and law schools seeking to protect their online reputations, he says, including the need for what panelist Kelly Obenauer, who works as assistant director of recruitment and marketing at Northwestern University School of Law, describes as “multiple touches.”

Readers are more likely to believe information from multiple sources, Obenauer explained. So it’s important to try to have the same message repeated by more than one individual. Fellow students are especially likely to be seen as trustworthy because of the shared affiliation.

Throughout the multi-day NALP 2010 Annual Education Conference & Resource Center Exhibition, however, those who have approached him individually have often expressed greater concern about the anonymous comments following ATL posts rather than the posts themselves, Mystal writes.

Asked who the commenters are and why readers believe what they say, Mystal recounts, he simply shrugs.

“I mean, do you think I know? I have no idea why a person with no knowledge would say something patently false about a firm that he/she doesn’t even work for,” he writes. “I have no idea why a person who actually does work for the firm in question would believe it. What can you do? It’s the Internet.”

For more details about his take on the program this morning, read the full ATL post.