WBG Builders Using Lawyer Letters to Do Reputation Management–Why?

Today I received the following correspondence:

__

March 4, 2008

Via Regular and Certified Mail

Eric Goldman

Ericgoldman.org

Santa Clara University School of Law

500 El Camino Real

Santa Clara, CA 95053

Via E-Mail

Eric Goldman

Ericgoldman.org

egoldman@gmail.com

Re: WBG Builders

Dear Sir or Madam:

This office represents WBG Builders. Attached please find a print-out from Ericgoldman.org which references WBG Builders. We ask that you kindly remove your reference to WBG Builders in your posting. Please note that the article to which you link no longer exists and/or does not mention WBG Builders.

Very truly yours,

Nash Law Firm LLC

Alan A. Reuter, Esquire

Enc.

___

See the original post in question about WBG Builders (with link fixed). Notice that this letter was sent on official law firm stationery by regular mail, certified mail and email–same content, received 3 times (all in the span of about 1 hour, as it turns out). I imagine many recipients would find repeated delivery of a letter like this intimidating and would happily comply to avoid further interactions with a lawyer.

Also interesting is that the letter requests that I fix a dead link by removing references to WBG Builders. Huh? Even if the link is dead, there’s no need to change the text. And as it turns out, it was easy enough to fix the link.

Instead, this approach suggests to me that perhaps WBG Builders is trying to do some reputation management and may not want consumers to know that it might sue them for saying things it doesn’t like. But absolutely consumers should know this in forming their opinions about WBG Builders, and any effort to scrub the Net of undesirable WBG Builder references is both distressing and doomed to fail.