Jerry Pournelle of sci-fi fame (Oct. 11, scroll down) got an unsolicited email from an outfit called “National Association of Personal Injury Lawyers” offering a “limited-time, complimentary membership” allowing for a listing on its website http://www.napil.com as a nifty “method to get more personal injury clients”.
I could compare notes on the subject, since I got a (somewhat differently worded) email from the same outfit in October (sent to an email address which is available to website visitors, but which I don’t use to subscribe to anything; it receives a lot of spam). And I, too, can vouch with confidence that I never requested or invited email from NAPIL.
According to the email I got, “There is no Sign-up fee, no annual fee. You only pay a voluntary referral fee when we give you a lead and you settle the case and earn your fee. To comply with most State Bars’ prohibition against fee sharing, we have no mandatory fee sharing agreement. When you do pay us a fee, you will share fee with a lawyer.” In the “P.S.”, it said: “Our website www.napil.com is on the top on Yahoo and MSN” — not a very useful boast without any specification of which search term results in their being “on the top”.
More on spam promoting lawyers and lawsuits: Jan. 5, 2005, Mar. 29-31, 2002.
P.S.: Well, that didn’t take long. This morning (Monday), less than a day after posting the item, I got an email from NAPIL, by its appearance sent to a wide audience rather than to me alone, adding specificity to the “at the top” boast. It says: “www.napil.com is on the top of Yahoo search. If you search for the term Personal Injury Lawyers on Yahoo, NAPIL is the Number One Result.” This claim checked out as true, as a visit to Yahoo confirmed. It goes on to claim: “We are also on the top on MSN.” When I visited MSN, I found that NAPIL turned up on the first page of results (at #9) when I entered the search phrase “personal injury lawyers” with quotation marks around it, but did not turn up on the first page when I omitted the quotation marks.
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