Online Compliments Can Haunt You, Too
19th September 2009
This is an oddly-written piece.
Shay Hable, an attorney in the Atlanta office of Bryan Cave, said she has been telling corporate clients to remind employees they shouldn’t give laid-off colleagues a plug in these online venues, because it might come back to haunt the company.
Yeah, well, I see how that’s a problem for the company — but how is that a problem for me? How does this “online compliment” threaten me, at all — unless the implication is that the company can retaliate in some way?
Ms. Hable said that bad recommendations are the ones that generally draw libel lawsuits, but even good ones can cause trouble. “Every day there’s a lawsuit for something, and the lawyer on the other side is looking at Facebook and LinkedIn.” She said that if someone has been dismissed because of poor performance, and a manager has given her a positive recommendation, “the story looks like it’s shifty, and they say ‘I caught you in a lie.’”
Well, maybe it is shifty. Maybe you did catch them in a lie. What about that?
Ms. Hable said she hasn’t been able to find any cases where a good LinkedIn recommendation has caused trouble, but she thinks the potential is there.
That’s because she’s a lawyer, and lawyers are paid to borrow trouble. This is like having a dairy farmer tell you ‘you never outgrow your need for milk’.