Venkat Balasubramani of the blog Spam Notes has a highly interesting guest column at AvvoBlog arguing that blog coverage has emerged as a new check on lawyers’ tendency to pursue their cases in an overzealous or hardball fashion. In the BlockShopper, Nordstrom/Beckons, and Kentucky domain-name seizure affairs, as well as numerous gripe-site and reputational-claim actions where the Streisand effect came into play, blogs have helped call national attention to the weakness of a litigant’s position, the danger that a disputant without major resources will be bulldozed by the cost of litigation, or both.
Balasubramani is kind enough to single out three bloggers in particular and to include me among their number:
…Walter Olson: who blogs at Overlawyered is another blogger who frequently flags unreasonable positions taken by lawyers. While he monitors litigation excess generally, absurd tort lawsuits are his specialty, and many a plaintiff’s lawyer has graced the pages of his blog in shame.
And he concludes:
Increased scrutiny of legal decisions and lawsuits by blogs and internet commentators will have undoubtedly have an overall beneficial effect. … Lawyers these days live in fear that one of their lawsuits will be highlighted on the pages of sites such as Overlawyered, the Legal Satyricon, or the Volokh Conspiracy. I know I sometimes do.
Whole thing here.