FORT WORTH, Texas (Legal Newsline) – Personal injury lawyers have again gone undercover to find out what is going on at those websites that connect clients to competitors.
Plaintiffs firms in Texas and New Mexico recently targeted Proaccidentinjurylawyers.com – a website that allegedly fools clients into thinking it is a legitimate attorney service. A group of lawyers whose names and images are featured on the site as “TOP LAWYERS” have filed a class action against the website, accusing it of tricking prospective plaintiffs into thinking they will be contacting firms like Texas’ Patterson Law Group.
Instead, those clients are allegedly told the Patterson phones are busy and referred to other personal injury firms that are willing to buy the clients' information. No specific buyer firm is named as a defendant.
“(U)nsuspecting members of the public are tricked into calling a call center, where an operator, pretending to be a law firm receptionist, takes down the client’s case information,” says a lawsuit filed July 30 in Texas federal court.
“If a caller asks to speak with the attorney listed on the website, the receptionist falsely informs the caller that the attorney is ‘on another line.”
In fact, attorney Travis Patterson called the phone number listed next to his name. He entered into evidence a recording of the call, during which he was told he was unavailable to talk to himself.
Potential plaintiffs who call these numbers actually have their information sold to other lead-generation companies and attorneys who are willing to pay, the suit says.
“Defendants and their end-user attorney customers are exploiting the plaintiffs’ and putative class’ names and reputations for their own commercial gain, intending to confuse and deceive the public by drawing on Plaintiffs’ and the putative class’ goodwill in the marketplace,” the suit says.
Named plaintiff firms, in addition to Patterson, are Law Office of Robert L. Henry, AmblerLaw and Durham, Pittard & Spalding.
Defendants are Rocket Verticals, the website and Jasdeep Singh.
Patterson’s undercover mission recalls another recently reported by Legal Newsline. Julie Perchersky Plitt had filed a class action against InventHelp then noticed an ad on classaction.org seeking clients to file the same allegations.
So she filled out a referral form and was invited to participate in a “free consultation.” Eventually, she was connected with Pennsylvania firm Berger Montague, which explained the firm’s coming lawsuit without mentioning the one Plitt had already filed.
It has erupted into a nasty dispute over who will lead the litigation. Berger Montague calls her “silly” and a conspiracy theorist, while Plitt says the firm violated legal ethics rules.