I don't really understand Newlawyer.com or their value proposition to consumers. It appears to be some sort of lawyer referral service. I don't have any opinion about the quality of those services.

Instead, I am writing because of what I consider to be Newlawyer.com's unethical marketing practices. Newlawyer.com has been aggressively trying to get links from bloggers (both prominent and obscure) throughout the web. I believe this is Newlawyer.com's way of trying to move up in the search engine rankings so that you are more likely to see Newlawyer.com's pages when you do searches.

Newlawyer.com is hardly alone in seeking links to improve search engine placement, but Newlawyer.com is among the most persistent and aggressive solicitors of links I have ever encountered. Newlawyer.com has telephoned me no less than 6 times and emailed me no less than 3 times (using slightly different versions of the same templates) asking me to link from my blogs to their site. Each time I have asked them (both on the phone and by email) to stop contacting me, and Newlawyer.com has repeatedly promised that they would honor that request. Those promises have been repeatedly broken. Many other lawyer-bloggers are complaining about being telemarketed and spammed by them as well; Newlawyer.com is routinely being complained about in Twitter and on blog pages, but Newlawyer.com doesn't seem to be listening. Nothing seems to be suppressing Newlawyer.com's carpetbombed link requests.

From my perspective, any site that is this desperate for link love, despite all of the ill will they are generating, is probably a site that doesn't deserve much credibility without such trickery. At minimum, it is not the type of company I would choose to do business with.

For more on the specifics of Newlawyer.com's telemarketing and spam campaign to me, see http://blog.ericgoldman.org/personal/archives/2009/10/newlawyercom_pe.html and http://blog.ericgoldman.org/personal/archives/2009/10/newlawyercom_sp.html. You might also check out the latest gripes about Newlawyer.com in Twitter at http://twitter.com/#search?q=newlawyer.