Readers may be familiar with the saga of the solicitors from hell website. A disgruntled client of a law firm started the site and it became pretty powerful with literally hundreds of vitriolic comments about a large number of solicitors and their law firms.

We’re certainly not saying that many complaints about solicitors are not merited, although as with every walk of life and every profession, there are good and bad. The issue which many had with this site was twofold :-

• comments were not checked or modified, there was no objectivity and much of the content was slanderous.
• the owner of the site starting demanding money from solicitors who complained to him and wanted their names removed from it. In fact, we also believe that the owner was charging money for advertising on the site also.

In any event, the owner clearly had a major beef with the whole legal profession, so much so that he also took on the Law Society. That case went to court quite recently, he lost, and was ordered to take the site down, and it also appears he may be insolvent. So, story over.

Apparently not. whilst browsing for legal content this week, we found a new website, www.solicitorsfromhell2.com (we would normally post a link, but in this case, out of principle, we are not going to directly boost that site in the search rankings). We haven’t yet checked on whether the owner of this new site is the same person, we would doubt it, and we have no idea what agenda the owner has, if any, but they certainly seem to be asking for trouble if they want to persist with this site, bearing in mind what happend to the original site.

What was interesting also about the original site is that many solicitors considered legal action (and some started it) to try and get the site taken down, but as it was hosted abroad, there were jurisdictional issues, which demonstrates just how complex these type of cases are and how the web remains very difficult to police.

If you have any interesting comments either on the original site, or it’s apparent successor, please do contribute.