Google

We are a law office in SE Minnesota, and we provide criminal defense and general practice such as civil suits. We do not receive a lot of google reviews, most people don't post socially about their criminal defense. We received 2 illegitimate reviews over the past 2 years, one from someone who asked us to represent them in an area of law we don't practice, who was the aunt of a client, and we could not represent her, she was irked by the fact we would not represent her, and she posted saying our client was thinking of getting a new attorney and that we need to 'get our ducks in a row', Our client was happy with our representation and did not get another attorney, but Google says this doesn't violate their policy, even though it was written out of spite. Ok I guess its tough to prove the facts to google, I get that, but the process took them less than 5 minutes to decide. We accepted this, got an ad company to promote a review campaign, emailed dozens of our clients, got a lot of great reviews, and brought up our star rating, even though it didn't really seem fair. A couple years later we served a civil complaint against a woman who stole a lot of expensive items from our client, who was storing things at her property. She admitted she was not giving his things back to the police and had put herself in a position that was very difficult to defend in MN law. She gave us a one star review in response to the lawsuit. I contacted google again to ask them to remove the one star review, giving them the certificate of service showing she was not a client of ours and she was reviewing this in retaliation of a lawsuit. They responded 3 weeks later asking us for a court order, they said without a court order they cannot do anything. It really makes me think twice about believing the ratings on Google, we also do bankruptcies and wills and a one star review with no context can really effect our business. We are restricted from replying with specifics about cases and my boss is hesitant to even point out she is an opposition in a suit because it can negatively effect our case if she contacts opposition without going through their lawyer, so we have no way to address this. I think Google has really hung small business attorneys out to dry with these sort of policies considering that criminal defense can often be upsetting for clients even if we get the best deal possible if the client isn't 100% understanding of the law, or if their family aren't given 100% of the information, as often times criminal clients don't give their families all of the sordid details. All in all I'm disappointed to know that Google cares not for the effects of their policies when given proof that the ratings are illegitimate, & I've lost respect for their review system entirely.