Consider, if you will, a case
appearing in the New York Post this week about a woman who had an experience
with a doctor’s practice that was so bad she felt compelled to leave negative
reviews on Yelp and two more specialized review sites telling other potential
patients to steer clear. No one on either side has claimed that she did so in
order to extort money (or anything else) from the doctor or the practice, but
they are claiming that the reviews are a baseless attempt to make the doctor
and/or the practice look bad. In suing the woman who left the reviews, the
plaintiff’s attorneys have stated that the doctor is a highly qualified practitioner
with the best possible training and therefore couldn’t possibly have committed
the annoying and possibly fraudulent acts the defendant’s reviews describe…
Now, we should probably
acknowledge that neither you nor I were present during these events, so we
couldn’t really draw any conclusions about the case even if we both had law
degrees. It is entirely possible that, as the doctor’s attorneys are claiming,
there is no truth to these allegations, and the reviews were made entirely by
the defendant out of personal animus. It is equally possible, however, that all
of the things in the reviews are accurate, and the plaintiff in this case is
using his greater financial resources to attempt to silence a disgruntled
former patient. What is not in dispute by either party is that the defendant
has already had to scrape together in excess of $20,000 in legal fees to defend
herself against a suit that has not even gone to court yet…
If it turns out that the
defendant was telling the truth all along it is possible that the court will
rule in her favor, but that won’t be much comfort if she ends up losing the
start-up business she has been developing and going bankrupt trying to pay her
legal fees. On the other hand, if the claims made in the reviews were baseless,
the doctor is entirely within his rights to sue to recover the damages those
reviews have cost his business, although I am skeptical as to whether those are
really in the million-dollar range. What seems obvious to me is that,
regardless of the merits of this case, there is almost certainly a non-zero
percentage of the negative reviews on Yelp that do have a factual basis – and in
such cases, even if the person leaving the negative reviews has hard evidence
that supports their comments, there is a real chance of their life being ruined
by a punitive lawsuit…
One could also argue that I’m
being unfair in blaming the people at Yelp for any of this, I suppose. The
truth is that in an increasingly interconnected age, everyone needs to be more
careful about what they say in public, and that includes things they post on a
public website. Blaming Yelp for cases like this one could be compared to
blaming the owners of a bar for the damage done in a fight that breaks out
there. But I would also point out that there is a reason why bars have
bouncers, why bartenders are allowed to cut belligerent drunks off before they
get too obstreperous, why troublemakers can be (politely) asked to leave before
anyone gets hurt…
And there is also a reason
why you should be careful who you pick a fight with in a bar, no matter how
good an idea it might have seemed at the time…
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