Blawger Victimized by Brooklyn Legal Aid Lawyer (Update!)

While it's hardly uncommon for some spam website to steal blawg posts and publish them as their own, in order to catch a few eyeballs and steer people toward their ads for counterfeit viagra, this is the first time I've seen something like this.

Apparently, the Queen of New York Blawgers, Niki Black at Sui Generis, has a fan who loves her just a bit too much.  The fan has a blog (and I use that term loosely).  According to the blog, his name is Michael Rehm, and he says that this is how he describes himself:
Hello, my name is Michael Rehm and I am a New York DWI Attorney. I currently practice at the Legal Aid Society in Brooklyn, New York. So...that means I am not a private lawyer, so please do not call and ask me to retain. I cannot accept private cases and it will just make me depressed. But I do believe there is a need for blogs like this to keep the public informed on the current changes and aspects of all New York DWI and Criminal Law. If you are a current client of mine, look around, and see what questions you have and you, and you alone, can call for legal advice. I am going to try and load this blog with as many resources as possible for my clients and for the public in general with the aim that no one who visits this site will walk into court uninformed. Right now, the blog is slim on resources, but that is changing, so keep an eye on this blog and it will meet all expectations. Good Luck!

I've never heard a Legal Aid lawyer describe himself as a DWI attorney before, since there is no such animal at LAS.  But animal he is.  He calls his blog the New York DWI Attorney Blog, which is similarly bizarre since this would clearly suggest some promotional motive, yet conflicts with the claim that he's a Legal Aid Lawyer.  According to the 2007 Legal Aid Society Annual Report, there is an attorney there named "Michael Rehm."  There's also a website for a Michael Rehm, a Sacramento DUI attorney, with some similarities that suggest it's the same person.

But the inconsistencies amount to little when one realizes that the entire content on the blog has been stolen, lock, stock and barrel, from Niki's posts at Sui Generis.  And this scoundrel has posted them as if they're his!

Niki plans on going after this piece of work today, hopefully bringing a rain o' feces down on his head for stealing her work, so it's possible that this sleazeball scoundrel's blog will be barren before long (and I hope this to be the case, for Niki's sake), but I didn't want something like this to pass without you knowing.

That's MICHAEL REHM, Legal Aid Society, Brooklyn.  If anybody knows this fellow, tell him how much we love him here.  And if you happen to come across him, please give him a little kiss from me.  If you have the time, maybe you can even suggest that he stop stealing other people's copyrighted work as it reflects poorly on him.

Update:  Ooooh, ooooh, this gets better.  Based upon his attorney registration in New York, this is the same guy, a 2006 admit, as the California joker, as the same telephone number appears in the NYS Directory.  And then there's his Youtube promotional video, which was uploaded June 2007, which should be while he is getting a paycheck from LAS.    The smell is getting stronger and stronger.

Posted by SHG at 9/16/2008 9:34 AM
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  • 9/16/2008 10:36 AM Joel Rosenberg wrote:
    The skeptic in me says that it may be the case that a perfectly decent guy, a legal aid lawyer named Michael Rehm or an indentically-named lawyer in CA specializing in DUI, has somebody who doesn't like him very much and has set him up for embarrassment.

    For reasons I think I may have mentioned, I'm perhaps somewhat sensitive to such possibilities.

    That said, somebody ripped off Ms. Black's postings; hope that somebody gets appropriately nailed.
    Reply to this
    1. 9/16/2008 10:48 AM SHG wrote:
      I thought that might be possible as well, but then some additional info came into hand.  See the update.
      Reply to this
      1. 9/16/2008 11:19 AM Joel Rosenberg wrote:
        Well, it's safe to say that a fairly huge quotient of stupidity is involved. If appearances are not deceiving, the Rehm-labeled blog simply grabs the RSS feed of her posts at Sui Generis; it looks like it's just a simplest-case aggregator. Trivially easy to do, and if it really is the guy, stupidity and cupidity of biblical proportions.

        I dunno. Other than that I'm going to get myself some popcorn.
        Reply to this
  • 9/16/2008 12:03 PM Nicole Black wrote:
    Just to add more info.-this guy initially had two feeds fed into his blog, Sui Generis' and another law blog, New York Law Blog, which is a law firm's blog. I notified the firm last night and their posts have now been removed.

    Last night, my posts were "featured" in their entirety, links and all. I've since modified my feed so that it only offers a small amount of content, hence the now-truncated posts.

    I contacted Mr. Rehm via email last night as well. He claimed that he innocently subscribed to my RSS feed and didn't know he was doing anything wrong. He advised he would remove my posts.

    As of now, he has yet to do so. And, as a result, the top post on his blog is rather ironic.

    While splogging is fairly common these days, this rises to a different level, in my opinion.

    Thanks for blogging about this Scott!
    Reply to this
    1. 9/16/2008 12:30 PM SHG wrote:
      My pleasure to help clean out the gutter, Nik.  And if I was a supervisor at Brooklyn LAS, I would have some serious questions about what this guy on my payroll was doing, soliciting DUI clients in Sacramento, holding himself out as a LAS DWI lawyer in New York, at the same time.
      Reply to this
  • 9/16/2008 4:29 PM Lex Fortis wrote:
    Awww, where did the video go? I love the front page post on Rehm's blog. Seems there is justice in law!
    Reply to this
    1. 9/16/2008 4:53 PM SHG wrote:
      It appears that Rehm's got the message.  Finally.
      Reply to this
  • 9/16/2008 8:17 PM Windypundit wrote:
    Heh. I've had a couple of people do that to me too, including a DUI lawyer. (They do seem to be the scourge of the internets, don't they?) However, at the bottom of each post he did link back to the source page on my blog, so I didn't complain. Every link counts.
    Reply to this
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