When Online Reputation Problems Become Legal Problems

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Welcome to the Healthcare Success podcast. And today I'm interviewing Daniel Powell. He is managing partner of Minc Law. First of all, welcome Daniel.

Daniel Powell (Minc Law): Thank you, Stewart, for having me on today.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): You know, today's conversation I think is going to be really interesting. I always sometimes talk about my when my spouse or my sister-in-law or other people that are not in the healthcare business are interested. I know I have a good topic because it has a broad level of interest, whether or not you're familiar with the healthcare marketing, healthcare legal space. And today is for sure an interesting topic that I think almost everybody will be interested in. So we're going to talk today about reputation management's been talked about for a long time.

And Daniel, as I told you at the very beginning of our friendship here a few weeks ago when we met for the first time that, you know, back in the day when Healthcare Success was was just getting started, we were being interviewed by the media because this idea of doctor ratings or healthcare ratings was so new. And doctors did not like it, Daniel. They wanted to sue their way out of it. They wanted to put all kinds of restrictions on their patients. And, you know, I said to people back then, you know, that's a little naive because Google loves reviews, patients love reviews. I don't think that's gonna work out. So I'm just curious, Daniel, you've been around for a while. We're gonna talk about when it does make sense to see an attorney, but any perspective on this from your standpoint?

Daniel Powell (Minc Law): Well, the First Amendment also loves reviews as well, right? Free speech loves reviews. And you know, in terms of what I do, you know, dealing with speech-related claims when they are actionable, this just is not a type of law you wanna play bully ball, if you understand that type of analogy. And you know, you will find bigwigs in professional fields such as healthcare or law or whatnot that think, yeah, you just throw money at the problem, flood the zone, and it's gonna go away. But this of course presents obstacles, constitutional, statutory, common law that you just don't run into in other sectors of the law.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Yep, for sure. So, you know, as I alluded to, we just alluded to both. Healthcare organizations have had negative reviews for nearly 20 years these days. And most sophisticated organizations already have reputation management tools, PR resources, process for responding to criticism. So, you know, at what point does an online reputation problem cross the line into something marketing or PR should manage into something much larger where you should consider calling a lawyer?

Daniel Powell (Minc Law): Yeah, I and I appreciate the aim of this question. This is something that often, you know, I get asked by by clients, other attorneys that represent these types of organizations. The short answer is when those tools don't work, or when they can't work and a response is still needed. That's really when, you know, the lawyer is more of a necessity, right? But I do want to not lose sight of the fact that we as lawyers we serve two functions.

One is legal response, of course, but the other one, which is very important in this field, is legal guidance. So it's never a bad idea to consult with a lawyer in terms of what you can do, not just for the crisis management, but also the regular use of those tools already on the organization's belt. Lawyers and doctors, we're not so different. We both address issues when they present, but perhaps more importantly, we counsel people on preventative measures. Point being that healthcare organizations should use all the tools on the belt, but never completely devoid of legal guidance.

I think a lot of these organizations you're talking about already have general counsel's offices, probably ones that are probably pretty competent in this and already have guidance. I just I hesitate to say, you know, “only bring the lawyers in when the PR doesn't work or the reputation management tools doesn't work” because sometimes the client comes to me and they already stepped in it in terms of the way that they respond. So you know, just you know, getting to the nuts and bolts of your question. You know, you know, again, knowing what can be done from a legal standpoint, should those other tools and resources not work may in fact dictate how you use those tools and resources. I hope that makes sense. But you know, when they don't work and again it's something that you know can't stand the healthcare organization needs to respond to it, then certainly bring in the big guns, those lawyers, and make sure that it's handled appropriately.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): So absolutely. And I think this will become more clear to our listeners as we dive into some specific examples. But let's start by distinguishing between something that's just damaging, something that's unfair, and something's actually defamatory. There's some legal rules here that might help guide our listeners to understand the difference here.

Daniel Powell (Minc Law): Yeah, sure. Defamation is a false assertion of fact. That is published to a third party, that is about you, of course. That is published with a requisite level of fault and harmful to the reputation. Now clients call me and I can tell you 95% of the time we can stipulate the three of those elements.

The two that we usually most get stuck on are the very first one and the fault element. Clients, potential clients, especially in the medical field, they focus on that last one. “It's harmful to my reputation. It must be actionable, right?” But we use speech all the time in ways that's harmful to people's reputation.

And it doesn't make it not free speech. So again, that very first element is a question that it seems complicated, but it's really not when you break it down. It calling someone a mean name a descriptive term, something like that. And the question really is: is it capable of being proven true or false? If it's not capable of being proven true or false, it's not capable of what we call a defamatory meaning and therefore cannot be actionable.

But let me throw a caveat in there. It's more complicated than that because the quote unquote statement, which might be at issue, is not always so obvious if the context is not considered. An example: do you still beat your wife? That's a question.

It's not a statement, right? But what's the clear and intended implication? That you previously beat your wife? So that question is capable of a defamatory meaning if asked or stated in the appropriate context. Another one, which might be very relevant in the medical field that we often run into are one-star reviews. In most cases, a one-star review standing alone, even of the best doctor in the world, is not defamatory, right?

They'll say, “I'm not a one-star doctor, I'm absolutely a five-star doctor. How can they rate me a one-star doctor?” But when one person leaves multiple reviews on a healthcare organization or doctor under different names, giving the appearance that it's done by multiple people, that false statement is that multiple people hold that negative opinion on it. And that is actionable according to case law that we've litigated.

So it's nuanced and it's complicated, but again, that very first question is the one I find that healthcare organizations need to answer first. Is it an objective and verifiable fact that can be proven true or false? But again, don't just focus on the words, focus on what is intended to be communicated.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): So part of the reason why when you team reached out to me, I was intrigued by this topic was this is such a specialized area of law, I'm assuming. And certainly there's free speech and there's different kinds of attorneys out there, and just like in healthcare, attorneys tend to specialize. I don't want to go too deep into this, but you mentioned case law. Is there a lot of case law on this area? And have you actually created some of that case law? Because we're getting pretty niche here.

Daniel Powell (Minc Law): Yeah. We've absolutely created the a lot of this case law. We've been in this particular niche for you know, going on 10 to 15 years. You know, it is you're right, it's a new niche. First 11 years of my legal career, it was easier to say what I didn't do than what I did do, right?

I mean, I had a very wide reach. But almost every topic I ran into would have 50 to 100 years of case precedent that, you know, dictated or at least suggested what the outcome or answer should be. Here, no. I mean, it certainly offers itself very well to the creation, modification of new law, arguments that courts have not considered. With that said, courts are very inclined to apply traditional defamation principles and defenses, constitutional, statutory, and whatnot, regardless if the speech online or not. So the you know the fact that it's online doesn't really deal with the actionability as much, but it can affect the reach, the damages, the other questions and of course, you know, things that we deal with such as anonymous attacks.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): So let's go and talk about the anonymous attacks. Let's suppose someone anonymously makes serious, demonstrably false allegations against a healthcare organization, one of its leaders. The organization doesn't even know who's behind it. What options do they have legally?

Daniel Powell (Minc Law): Well, sure. I mean, legally speaking, you can always report the review, you know, for a terms of service violation, if it does violate the terms of service. But you know, healthcare organizations probably have come to learn platforms are not terribly responsive to those types of reports. But again, as you said, assuming that it is actionable speech, a demonstrably false statement and meets the other elements, then you do have the option to file a lawsuit. And the way that we typically frame those lawsuits is the plaintiff, the healthcare organization, or the doctor versus a John Doe defendant.

We frequently name that John Doe defendant by whatever username is being used on the review, right? So maybe Calvin Smith or Mary Poppins or something silly like that, right? You know, we can do John Doe or Jane Doe, aka Mary Poppins. And we get that suit on file. And depending on the jurisdiction, sometimes we need court approval, other times we have subpoena power right away.

But the idea is to get the user data from the platform itself. You only can get that user data by issuing a valid court subpoena to the platform. And the hope there is that the user data is going to allow you to unmask the party responsible. And at that point we get to the whodunit stage, right? And you know the whodunit can dictate where we take it from there.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Very interesting. Now the review platforms you're spending a lot of time with, I'm assuming, are Google, Yelp, maybe Facebook. We also talked about Glassdoor and healthcare organizations can face organizations of real employees or presumably not employees, of racism, sexism, harassment, toxic culture, all kinds of things. What can and can't an organization realistically do in that particular scenario?

Daniel Powell (Minc Law): Well, I mean Glassdoor, the principles are no different than any other review. It's either actionable or it's not. The issue with Glassdoor is that platform in particular, and indeed a very similar platform, are very, very proactive in terms of their protection of their users. Meaning whereas I might issue a subpoena for Google and say, you know, “we need the user data on these 10 user accounts that have left reviews for my client.” And Google is not going to actively fight me on that most of the times.

What it will do is it will place its user on notice and it will give the user the option to object to file a motion to quash or some other type of challenge to the subpoena. Glassdoor and platforms like that are more likely to actively fight you on it. They're more likely to file a motion to quash on the behalf of Glassdoor, arguing to the court that they shouldn't have to comply with the subpoena, making all the arguments that the defendant would make in terms of protected speech or other immunities. And they're very good at it. They have very good attorneys. They make these arguments a lot.

So you know, in terms of me talking to potential clients about coming, you know, I never sell a Glassdoor review as an easy job, even if it is just clearly and patently objectively false. But Glassdoor, they will consider removal requests on the merits, unlike you know, some of these other platforms that are more numb to the process, if that makes sense.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Got it. And so and sometimes the attacker isn't a patient or employee at all. You've actually encountered competitors, I believe, or other third parties trying to damage a healthcare's reputation. Tell us a little bit about that.

Daniel Powell (Minc Law): Yeah, I mean this is something that, you know, I have these conversations with potential clients that call me and talk about, you know, either a flood of reviews or just a handful that came in that are highly suspicious. Healthcare professionals tend to, you know, have strong suspicions as to who it is at the time that it comes in. And that's at least been my experience working with them for the past 10 years on this type of stuff. And they're frequently wrong. You know, they they they assume it's a patient, it's not, or a specific patient, one that had an issue with them.

So what I often tell them is you don't want to misfire on this kind of stuff. You don't want to approach someone that might already have an issue with you and challenge them on a review they didn't publish, right? That just sort of pours gasoline on the fire, especially now with a lawyer. So getting to that whodunit part can be very, very critical. And I say that because in a healthcare organization's perspective, well, if the review is left from the perspective of a patient, right? And we get to the whodunit and we find out it's an ex employee or a competitor or the doctor's neighbor who is having a dispute over some property line with him. Whatever it is, you know, that can dictate what claims are available.

You know, if it's a competitor, you’ve got unfair trade practices going on, right? You’ve got perhaps false advertising claims, and you’ve really got a tiger by the tail, right? That might be a time where you don't just want to get compensated for your losses, but you want to drag them. You want them to be punished, right, for what they did. And deterred from from future conduct.

And that is a right of recourse that you have. Patients, you tend to want to resolve those quickly, more quietly, right? You don't want a big public fight with a patient about some online statements that they made. Ex employees, it can be a mixed bag, right? It depends on who it is, it depends on what they said and where they posted it.

But getting to that whodunit part. Me being able to call the company or organization and say, okay, we figured it out. This is who it is. This is the one person who left those 30 reviews, or you know, whatever the answer is. And then we can have an informed conversation on what they want to do, right?

I mean, is the person even collectible? If you get a huge judgment, what does your best day in court look like? Do you need a judgment to get the reviews down? There’s a bunch of questions that come into it. Do we just want to demand a retraction at that point and let things go away quietly?

There are pragmatic business decisions that need to be made at that point, especially when I'm dealing with an organization. And those conversations that I have to have with the professionals there to set personal feelings aside, right? And make the right decision for the organization is a very important. It's a it's a flash point in the in the litigation or the legal representation matter.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): So when we talked recently, because certainly you get individual doctors, but more in the kinds of audience that we get in Healthcare Success. You talked about a multi state health system that suddenly found itself caught in a social media firestorm created by somebody who didn't even work there anymore. Like what happens and how do you intervene in those cases? I because I think people really enjoy the anecdotes.

Daniel Powell (Minc Law): Yeah, this was a I liked it as a nice feather in my cap in terms of of getting this one removed because it won't name the organization. But you know, it's a organization that let's just say keeps me a phone call away for this type of crisis management, right? And I work regularly with their ORM team. They're they're online reputation management team will send me something, say, “Hey, can you look at this? What do you think?”

One day I woke up, I think I got emails from the general counsel, the ORM guy, even the CEO of the organization. Things were just completely on fire because someone who once worked there made I think a one-word comment in response to a post about Charlie Kirk's death. This was several months after Charlie Kirk was assassinated. She made some comment, it offended people, and this one account called Libs of TikTok, who's run by a very strong MAGA woman in the social media sphere, lots of followers, and very, very big on cancel culture when they find someone that did something they should. They found that comment. They found the woman's LinkedIn page.

The woman's LinkedIn page incorrectly identified her current employer as my client, even though she hadn't worked there in over a year. And the Libs of TikTok account published a post which said you might want to consider not going to visit doctors of this organization, look at who they employ. It was shared thousands of times. People started calling the hospitals, even the ones that were not even close to the location she worked at, right? They were just getting hit from all directions and it was going a bit viral.

You know, I talked to them. We figured the best plan was to politely knock on the door, not kick open the door, right? Send a notice of representation, ask for a conversation, politely advise that the person doesn't work there anymore, that the that the post was false, and asked them to remove it to mitigate the damages that were coming down. I honestly did not anticipate that they would comply right away, but you know, credit to them. They did.

I think it was either the same day or the next morning. I got a very quick response. It says, “it's been removed. Thanks.” That was it.

And to me that's mission accomplished, right? You know, we considered, well, do we need to do some cleanup on the people that shared it or whatnot? And you know, in that case, we thought that, well, you know, we got the main target down, the main the source is down, it you know, and we'll see how things fall up from there. And it worked out, right? I mean it didn't blow up from there.

And I've actually dealt with this exact issue for multiple organizations. I think it's it's my third time now. One was a major auto dealership where the daughter made a similar comment in response to social media posts about Charlie Kirk's death. And you know, you're talking about a dealership that has like 100 locations, in the area, and you know, they were getting flooded with fake reviews and calls and all that. It's really a beehive type effect when those types of situations kick in. And that does require emergency response.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): So an interesting comment there. The it's funny, I've talked to another attorney years ago. I remember him saying, you know, the tip he's like, you know, “marketers will say when there's a crisis, say everything, you know, be transparent and you know, from a reputation management standpoint,” but there are times where legally that's exactly the worst thing you can do. How do you advise people? Like what time when, you know, should the CEO, the CMO, the attorneys all be in the room to make decisions on what to do and what not to do?

Daniel Powell (Minc Law): Yeah, I know what you're getting at. The talk first, talk fast philosophy, right? And in terms of crisis management response, I mean some of the ones that I know in that profession that are the best at it, will, you know, talk about that a lot. But lawyers, of course, you know, we want to you know we don't want our clients just going off the cuff in terms of responding to these things, possibly saying things they shouldn't, possibly violating HIPAA in the context of healthcare, possibly violating so you know the new FTC rules.

So, you know, again, legal guidance is always a you know a good thing to obtain. Yeah, in terms of you're saying when everyone gets in, you know, needs to get into a room and put their head together, right? Again, I'm just gonna go back to this, you know, you need to remove the personal feelings from these types of attacks, especially online, right? And as far as traditional PR responses go, I give you an anecdote. I mean, I was in you know, an office with a judge a few months ago. This is a judge probably close to 80 years old, right? You'd like to say he's near in retirement, but you never know when judges actually, you know, call it quits.

The and the judge, you know, he not not in a rude way, but he sort of looked at me and says, “you know, when I first started practicing law, my mentor told me that You gotta be really hesitant to bring a defamation case because you just, you know, blasting it out there what someone said, you know, maybe in a small crowd or something.” I said, “Well, that might be true in the pre digital age, but nowadays something gets posted online, you say, ‘Well, am I gonna have that echo into eternity on the internet? Or am I gonna do something about it?’” So, you know putting the heads together, getting the PR people, getting the execs, getting the legal team together to make the right decision. And quickly, right? You know, not passing up any deadlines or timelines, is vital.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Very good. We also talked a little bit about you and I shared with you an example earlier in my career where an employee said some things about the doctor, the doctor sued the employee, and this was so novel at the time. Then it became first page news. The unintended effect. And I hadn't heard the term Streisand effect, but then I looked that up later. Tell our audience what the Streisand effect is and how that can make things much, much worse. And you know, you also mentioned a similar story with a physician who sued over a relatively obscure, you know, accusation and made it much, much, much worse.

Daniel Powell (Minc Law): Yeah, and well let let's talk about the physician 'cause I think that's a that's a great illustrative example. And people can Google it. Google the name Dr. Lucas Murray. Murrey M-U-R-R-E-Y.

And look at the AI summary on him now. This is his identity online. So Dr. Lucas Murrey, well, according to the media reports that you will find, got upset because he was posted on what's called “Are we dating the same guy?” pages these are on Facebook they're private groups but they have thousands of members and each region has one right no there's a one for LA New York Washington DC Chicago you name it there's a page there's a group online. It's supposed to be women only. And the idea is they post guys' pictures and say, Hey ladies, do you have any tea on him? Right? Any gossip? Anyone dated him? Any experiences?

It's hard for me to not call a forum like that hyperbolic, right? And if you read the actual comments, and you know, sort of the exchanges, you would get what I mean. I mean the intent is good, right? I mean the intent is saying, “Hey ladies, let's keep each other safe.” In reality, it's just a forum that, you know, they they drag men they don't like. There's also other ones like the like. Okay, so getting back to Dr. Lucas Murrey. Dr. Lucas Murrey was part posted on Are We Dating the Same Guy?

Maybe more than one page. But okay, remember, these are private groups, it's not public, you can't get to it through a Google search or anything like that. He decides to sue. Sues like 50 women, right? You know, defamation, you know, dragging him.

Well, whatever he was trying to cover up, whatever he wanted gone in that Are We Dating the Same Guy private Facebook group now dominates his Google search results. So that was a trade off. And I'm not saying that he didn't know that going in. Maybe he did. Maybe he accepted that risk.

But it's my job to advise clients of that. I've it's never happened to me, right? I not in one of my cases. I often say the less you heard about me, the better job I've done. Because clients hire me to fix things, not to make a big mess like this.

You know, I'm not out there to generate internet content. I'm trying to quiet it down. So yeah, that is a that's a great response. I and if you want a good example of someone wading into this area of the law and experiencing a Streisand effect. Again, Google Lucas Murrey, U R R E Y.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Yeah, that's the challenge. Not just “could we pursue this legally,” but “should we?” And that's part of the judgment I think you mentioned earlier, and what's the potential blowback. Another complication healthcare has is the whole HIPAA and privacy. And, you know, again, most of the clients we work with are familiar with HIPAA for sure.

And, you know, like a patient can just go online, publicly describe an encounter in great detail, but the healthcare organization Of course cannot. So for the people that aren't that close to this, and just maybe as a reminder to people that are younger, like what can you do and what can't you do and what is limiting with HIPAA? Because from the outside it may be like, “Well, the patient started, they disclosed,” but there's more to it than that.

Daniel Powell (Minc Law): Well, first of all, let's let's talk about when you're putting a public response to a review, who are you talking to? You're not talking to the patient. You can communicate with that patient a thousand other ways. You're communicating or you're talking to the people that you anticipate reading that review and formulating an opinion on you. And you have to consider in your response and how you frame that response how that is going to dictate that opinion or how they're going to view the overall interaction. Right?

So certainly all laws aside, be cautious how you engage for that purpose. But as you point out, in the healthcare industry, there's an added wrinkle, you know. Even if the review is positive, even if the review says, “went to Dr. Smith today, wonderful experience, procedure went great.” And Dr. Smith responds and says, “So happy that you had a positive experience. We also thought the procedure went well.” Guess what? Violated HIPAA, right? No, even though the patient just echoing what the patient said. So yeah, be very careful with that. I encourage healthcare organizations because of this risk to have some canned responses. Okay. Not a single response, but sort of like, you know, options that the PR people can pick from. It should be very neutral. It should be something, you know, that shows that you listened to the concerns, that you're open to discussions about it, right? You often see the good responses be “thank you for for you know for this feedback. We are always willing to discuss your concerns. Please contact us at” and give a number, right? And it shows that. You know, you were receptive to the concerns. It shows that you're willing to be responsive, as opposed to some doctor responding and saying, you know, “you're full of you know, BS and you know, never come back to my office again,” right? Prospective patients read that, they don't want to call that doctor.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Yep, that makes sense. So the what you mentioned earlier, you've talked about this a couple of different ways, preparation. What other things can you do to prepare in advance? You know, it's not practical even for health systems, you know, nobody has unlimited money. But where does it make sense to do, you know, the due diligence in advance to set up guidelines legally to make sure everything is set up and also be ready for crises, you know, God forbid they should occur.

Daniel Powell (Minc Law): Yeah. So I mean, at least get some minimal education on what is legal compliant what what's legally allowed to be done, input of course from from individuals as far as what the options and you know you can consider your costs in terms of being proactive, I mean you should have some monitoring in place, right? I mean you need to monitor your digital footprint. You need to invest in your digital footprint in terms of building it out.

Because you know if an attack happens, right, and you think of the internet as a giant swarm, right? Well you want most of that swarm to be positive. You want it to be good news, good articles, good reviews, all that, you know, it's not just to get the good word out about your organization, but it's to safeguard against the eventual, sometimes inevitable, false and defamatory attack. If a doctor has five reviews total and gets five negative reviews, guess what? His ratings go in the tank.

But if he has 500 reviews and they're positive and he gets five negative, it's barely a blip on the radar in terms of average star rating. So you want to be proactive in building out a good digital footprint, making sure that you own your presence online to the extent you can, your website, claim your review pages, and have something in place to alert you when something happens online to the extent you need to respond to it quick, you need to know about.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Yeah, for sure. And of course, you know, pretty much all the organizations we work with have reputation management platforms. They usually have somebody in charge of monitoring them. So they are doing that. But the distinction is when we start thinking about you know, again, lawsuits and or at least getting an attorney involved.

A couple questions as we wrap up here. One is, in the age of AI, people could with, you know, malintent can scale even faster. And have you seen any evidence of that? Because it's frightening when you think about what really could be potential as somebody who really knew what they were doing, if they were trying to defame somebody.

Daniel Powell (Minc Law): Yeah, I've actually seen this before AI became a major topic of discussion in the past year or so. But the first types of attacks that I saw with use of AI was actually let me give you a little bit of a let me back up just a bit. There used to be very prominently on the internet, what we would call shaming websites. Ripoff Report, The Dirty, She's a Home Wrecker Cheater Land, Complaints Board, these types of sites that provided a platform that third party users could go on and write whatever they want, you know, pretty much unmoderated about someone else and publish it. And then the business model for those sites is to just claim immunity under section 230.

Say it's not our problem, but if you paid them money, they would take it down. Right. So that was a profitable business model for these sites. And they would make sure that whatever was posted there would be on your first, second, third page of Google. You know, so you couldn't avoid it in your digital footprint.

Now AI rolls around. And what we saw was these creation of these large networks of these types of sites that weren't user generated, but they were just sort of the same article and shuffling the deck chairs around within that article. So let's say they wanted to target a doctor, say a plastic surgeon, and what they would do is they would write an article or they would have AI generate an article based on every bad review that the AI could find on that doctor online. Every negative comment. And it would say, you know, the headline would say something like, “Dr. Smith of Atlanta, Georgia, should you see him? Here is some feedback.” And then you read it and you're like, “wow, that's a terrible doctor,” right? Because it just picked out every bad bit of bit of information. And then AI would again shuffle that article around and publish it on like 10 different sites, all the same gist, but different wording. Right, you know, different framing of it. And it was the same model. I mean, it was the same model where they, you know, wanted payment for removal. I have not seen or at least haven't run into it yet in terms of fake online reviews. But what professionals in all industries are very concerned about now with AI is the fact that it's quickly taking over search engines as a source of information online, right?

I mean even you go on Google now and Gemini is spitting out an answer to you. An example I gave with Dr. Lucas Murrey, the AI overview is going to give you the gist of it now. So and that's pulling from everything else on which is just another reason to say, well, is SEO search engine optimization gonna work the same a year from now? Is it gonna be an effective tool? ‘Cause you can bury a an article or something negative 20 pages deep on Google, but if AI can still pull it and put it, you know, put it first page on its results, what good does that do?

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Right. Very interesting. The last question and a half or so is in terms of hardening it, making yourself a harder target. We talked about being ready to defend in advance, but anything else or just some basic safety measures, you know, “don't jump in a pool full of sharks or drive blindfolded at a hundred.” What things can you do to help, you know, make yourself a harder target to be treated unfairly?

Daniel Powell (Minc Law): Don't don't engage online. I mean, I think that is the biggest mistake I see professionals make in a bunch of fields. Something bad happens, people attack them online, and they just cannot resist the urge to engage with the beehive, to respond to their comments, to challenge their thought process. I've never seen that work out well for the person responding, right? So, you know, in terms of safeguarding yourself, don't shoot yourself in the foot, I guess is my point. Don't cut off your nose to spite your face. You wanna, you know, install those proactive measures, but when response is actually needed, don't do it from a point of distress. Right?

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): That makes sense entirely. For sure. Rational thinking wins, right? It's hard sometimes. Take a breath, get appropriate counsel, legal or otherwise, but don't do things based on pure emotion. And it's tough. I get it. It's really hard being treated unfairly. Daniel, any other last thoughts?

Daniel Powell (Minc Law): No, I mean I will say that I think that healthcare professionals care as much about their digital footprint as any other professional, if not more, that I deal with. I probably represent more doctors than any other single profession. Healthcare organizations and medical professionals, people need to trust you. People need to not have any concerns about risks going in. So for all that purpose it's vital to protect your digital footprint, to jealously safeguard your online reputation. Because, you know, unfortunately, people make decisions now before you've ever had a chance to make a pitch to them, right? They're basing their decisions off of what some third party said about you online. So, you know, don't dismiss it as just the internet. Don't, you know, accept it as fair criticism if it's not. But never use a hatchet when a scalpel will do. And I hope that makes sense.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Actually, I do have one final question that just reminded me of something that happened very recently. Our team identified a prospective client who had some bad news in it. But then when we start thinking about this as a multi-location health system, if you've got thousands of doctors and you know, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of employees and millions of patients. It's possible things are gonna be bad. So does the problem multiply when you get into larger institutions? Because just by the nature of the law of averages, things can happen. And is there anything special that the larger institutions should be aware of or can do?

Daniel Powell (Minc Law): I think that the larger institutions are generally a bit more insulated from any single attack. You know, but I think that what larger institutions need to be more concerned about is the reputation of the people on top. As far as individually speaking. Okay. So someone attacks a single surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic. You know, which here in my area has its own ZIP code, it's so big. You know, they're not likely to call me. Someone attacks the CEO, they very well may, right? Large organizations in this day and age, need to understand that the reputation of their CEO and their leadership is tied to the organization. It often defines how people view the organization. So that's certainly something that they need to keep an eye on. And it, you know, it's justified for the organization to protect that reputation, even though it is a personal reputation.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Totally makes sense. Daniel, what is your website in case somebody wants to look you guys up or contact you?

Daniel Powell (Minc Law): Sure, our website is minclaw.com. That's M as in man, I, N as in Nancy, C as in cat, law.com. Find you'll find all of our contact information on there, a ton of educational resources, videos, articles. Feel free to browse around. And anyone that wants to contact me directly, feel free to. I can be reached at dpowell at minclaw.com.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Great. Daniel, I appreciate your time today. Thank you. It's been an interesting conversation as I knew it would be. Thanks again.

Daniel Powell (Minc Law): Anytime Stewart, happy to appear again if you need me.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Okay.

Daniel Powell (Minc Law): Thank you.