The Legal Wisdom of Michelle Boatley

I don't know how many times over the years I've used the punchline from this comic by Peter Steiner of the New Yorker:  On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.  It's perfect.  Yet, chuckle though so many do at the line, it rarely sinks in. And digital natives and emigres continue to believe because, well, we just can't believe otherwise.

Thomson Reuters is a major player in legal publishing. It's a legit company, well known and well regarded because it sells us stuff with the name "West" on it. And West is huge, having lined pretty much every lawyers book case and library since their first day of law school.  If you can't trust Thomson Reuters, who can you trust?

Except...

Jim Romenesko reveals a bit of a quirk about Thomson Reuters writer Michelle Boatley, who was a mainstay legal journalist of their Australasian Legal Business publication.

A few years ago, Boatley was cranking out stories left and right — short pieces about law firm layoffs, merger deals, and firm expansions.

Then she vanished.

Fired? Tossed to the side by heartless editors? Nah.

 

The prolific legal writer was not real, but a creation of ALB bosses.

“The names were there to make it look as if the ALB teams were bigger than they really were,” one of my sources writes in an email. “Also, so editors don’t have to use their own names on certain stories (no particular reason).”

See what they did there?  Michelle Boatley had a Facebook account and a gmail address. That was all they needed to create a legal journalist out of thin air.  Want to make your publication look like it's got a slew of reporters? Just stop by a few websites and, boom, fantasy becomes reality.  Because, as another line that fools embrace informs us, you are what google says you are.

One might have thought that only gutter-dwellers played this game of creating fictional personas on the web, phony lawyers like David Blade or highly experience and deeply caring lawyers like, well, 90% of the baby lawyers in solo practice.  Or perhaps it's just about grabbing eyeballs for social media consequence using anything available, without regard to how monumentally stupid or worthless, because the only thing that matters anymore is to be a rock star on the internet.

But no, even the big boys like Thomson Reuters plays the game.

Of course, why believe what bloggers have to say when you can rely on legit legal publishers, right?  And clearly everything you find on the internet is true, as everyone knows.  Except Michelle Boatley.

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