Florida Bar Laughs Off Nonsensical ‘Bar Complaint’

From TechDirt.com:  Remember Patrick Zarrelli? Of course you do. He’s the dude bro, who claimed to run a “reputation management” service, who was hired by an attorney named Gary Ostrow to “clean up” his Google mentions. At issue were a bunch of blog posts from blogging lawyers mocking Ostrow’s ridiculous press release. Zarrelli seemed to think that the proper strategy to “manage” Ostrow’s “reputation” was to call up a bunch of these lawyers — many of whom have built their reputations on protecting free speech rights — and threatening them, saying they should take down their blog posts. That went about as well as you’d expect if you’ve spent any amount of time online. Lots of people wrote about Zarrelli’s fuck up, including us. As that mess was happening, Zarrelli lashed out a few times, threatening bar complaints against the lawyers mocking him.

A week and a half later we received a bizarre little package from Zarrelli with stacks and stacks of paper, claiming that he had filed bar complaints against all of the lawyers who had mocked him, and that he was “filing criminal charges” against all of them — and our own Tim Cushing who wrote the original article. We pointed out, in response, that individuals don’t file criminal charges (that’s up to law enforcement) and nothing that was done was a criminal violation. Hell, it wasn’t even a civil violation, though Zarrelli insisted he was filing one of those cases too. We noted that the most likely story was that Zarrelli wandered into a local police station and whined about people being mean to him online, and they gave him a report number, like they do with anyone. That’s not a criminal case. It’s just wasting the time of the police. We soon got a copy of the police record confirming our suspicions.

To read the rest, click here.