Losey PLLC

08/18/2024

Losey PLLC is proud to announce that nine of our attorneys have been recognized in the 2025 edition of Best Lawyers in America®. Adam Losey for Commercial Litigation, Corporate Law, and Electronic Discovery and Information Management Law; Catherine Losey for Employment Law - Management; Ralph C. Losey for Commercial Litigation, Electronic Discovery and Information Management Law, Employment Law - Management, and Information Technology Law; Vincent A. Citro for White-Collar Criminal Defense and General Practice; Karen Middlekauff for Family Law, Family Law Arbitration, and Family Law Mediation; Joseph E. Foster for Litigation in Commercial, Banking and Finance, Bankruptcy, Real Estate, and Mortgage Banking Foreclosure Law; Lynne M. White for Real Estate Law; George R. Coe for Commercial Litigation; and David A. Meek II for Commercial Litigation.

Best Lawyers recognitions are compiled based on a Purely Peer Review® evaluation. Lawyers are not required nor allowed to pay a fee to be listed. For the 2025 edition of The Best Lawyers in America®, more than 23 million votes were analyzed, which resulted in more than 80,000 leading lawyers included in the milestone 31st edition.

08/18/2024

From our own Ian Johnson, The FTC finalized updates to its rules regarding use of consumer reviews and testimonials on August 14, 2024. The FTC’s stated goal is to address issues surrounding fake or fraudulent reviews. The rule reiterates that reviews should come from real customers and reflect those real customers’ experience and opinion with the product(s) or service(s) reviewed. The Commission points out that this means using reviews generated by AI is considered fraudulent practice and may result in enforcement action against an offending business.

The rule contains two other notable provisions.

The first is that businesses are prohibited from providing compensation or other incentives that are contingent on a customer writing a positive or negative review. A company cannot, for example, offer a 20% discount for writing a 5-star review. This does not prohibit incentivized reviews entirely, and does not prohibit all testimonials provided in exchange for free product samples. However, the Commission noted that even implied incentives may violate the rule, such as “Get 20% off for telling everyone how much you love our product.”

The second is that the rule prohibits selling or buying fake social media indicators such as likes, follows, or reposts. This rule applies to buying social media indicators that the company knows or should know to be fake. This means that companies should carefully evaluate any social media marketing partnerships to ensure these vendors are not providing false indicators.

The rule contains several other elements and a summary from the FTC can be found here.

The Federal Trade Commission today announced a final rule