As a lawyer, your reputation in the community among your peer and clients is everything.  If you’re a great lawyer, fellow attorneys and old clients will refer you business because they know of your good work.  If you’re a lawyer that cheats people out of money – sure you could probably pull it off for a little while, but sooner than later, it will catch up with you and people will know that you have a reputation as a bad attorney.

It is because our reputation is tantamount to our success, that we need to be cognizant of what that reputation is.  What does the community think about us?  What does our client think about us?  Due to the internet, it is commonplace for clients to rate services from restaurants to plumbers to lawyers.  They have a myriad of places they can do this – either to say how great you are or how much you suck.  They have services like Yelp, Avvo and Google Places, just to name a few.

The best way to monitor what people are saying about you online, is to simply set up Google Alerts.  Google Alerts is a feature that does a continuous search of the internet to find key terms that you tell it to look for and either places it in your RSS Reader or emails you when it finds something new.  Here’s how to set it up:

First, go to google/alerts and you’ll find this

Enter in the search terms you want to search for and create an alert either by email or RSS feed.  Repeat this process for multiple search terms.  This is what my Google Alert looks like.  Notice that I do a search for my name, law firm name and all of my website just in case someone links to any one of my sites, I know instantly.