Google has been hit with another AdWords-related lawsuit, this time by a Connecticut law firm.The personal injury firm Stratton, Faxon filed a suit in the New Haven Superior Court alleging that its name was being used to trigger ads for the rival law firm Silver, Golub and Teitell. Stratton, Faxon causing confusion and endangers its reputation.
The firm has asked for an injunction and for a prejudgment lien against Google for $50,000.
Attorney Michael Stratton (not the ex-football player), a partner in Stratton, Faxon, said he discovered the ads after learning of the recent class-action lawsuit filed against Google by Firepond.
News about that case prompted him to search for his law firm’s name.
He learned that links to Stratton Faxon appeared high in the organic results, but that the firm Silver, Golub and Teitell appeared as the top sponsored listing.
Richard Silver of Silver, Golub and Teitell said he only recently learned of the details of his firm’s AdWords campaign. “A communications firm was recently hired to assist our firm with Internet search response. I was unaware that search words would include other firms’ names,” he said in a statement. “If anyone at Stratton Faxon had called me, I would have immediately stopped the practice, as I did as soon as I learned of it.”
Stratton Faxon alleges that Google interfered with the firm’s business relations with clients, engaged in an unfair business practice under Connecticut law, and was unjustly enriched.
Stratton added that he wanted to get into court as soon as possible to prevent the further use of his firm’s name to trigger ads. “We’re interested in stopping what was going on,” he said. “We’ve chilled anybody who might want to do this.”
The lawyer also said he is considering representing other potential plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit against Google.
It’s clear that the Firepond case has opened the door.
This is now the the third case filed against Google since Firepond’s, less than 2 weeks ago.
“Don’t be Evil” (Unless it makes us a lot of money).
Nice to know that Google is fitting in nicely with the rest of our business leaders.
Everyone is hungry during a credit crunch. I guess we should expect a slew of suites to hit goog in the near future.
I have to say though that something has to be done about this. I think goog overlooks to much today knowing they will be hit with lawsuits in the future. It’s a calculated risk they take because the up front profit is so big. This is the convenient route for the bottom line. The the entire adwords platform is a rip-off from Goto/Overture/Yahoo. They knew they would get sued for running CPC ads back in the day, but why not. The attitude is we’ll settle for $150 M now and build multi-billion dollar company in the mean time.
Ever spoken to an adwords rep on the phone? They are the lamest people on earth, they are so ignorant about CPC advertising, targeting, segmenting, etc. Once again this is convenient for goog because it ads to the bottom line. Keep the advertiser in the dark is the attitude.
Goog just a bunch of bullies. Last night as I was going to sleep I was thinking “hopefully Bing will be a good search engine” and it will take some market share from Goog.
Actually the lawyers are ONLY going after Google because they have MONEY. Google does nothing wrong, doesn’t anyone see that the lawyers are wrong? They are scared of competition! Why would someone want to know RIVAL competitors information, when they are searching for theirs? HMMM That sounds completely useless.
It actually is perfect sense, and has the consumer in mind by doing so. Google will win, and by censoring ads/results another search engine will come to fill their place. Just like P2P, just like everything on the internet.
DS you are right.
Google has money and probably a nice insurance plan.
Silver, Golub and Teitella are wrong for using the name of a competitor to trigger ads. Not sure how much culpability Google assume. Because policing use of keywords would require a full time team of Google evaluators.
The responsibility rests mostly with the keyword purchaser to not exploit a known trademark.
Well findlaw which i assume is handling the marketing for Silver, Golub, and Teitella apparently understands domains. They run their site off lawyermarketing.com but call themselves FindLaw? I’m not sure how this applies but thought it was interesting and in the context of TheDomains.com
whats the output now ?