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Law.com, the owner of brands including The American Lawyer and Legalweek, has been caught up in allegations its advertising service is less than it appears.

Earlier this year Skillburst, a company which provides training to lawyers and law firms, asked Law.com to promote its products over Law.com and ALM’s ‘Legal Newswire’ service.

Legal Newswire was set up in 2018 by Law.com and ALM in a partnership with a Florida company called iCrowdNewswire. The coverage offered was wide. Law.com promised its "unique solution" could shoot out press releases to thousands of legal journalists and bloggers and place adverts on various leading legal publications. Who knew so many people were writing about law.

Skillburst was put in touch directly with iCrowdNewswire after it decided to spend $3,550 on Legal Newswire to get its adverts on various sites including RollOnFriday.

But Skillburst staff said they grew suspicious when they requested live screenshots of their advertisement in situ and received a crude mock-up of the banner pasted onto websites.

Suspecting that the images were fabricated, Skillburst asked ROF if its advertisement had ever appeared on the pages of this august orange organ. It had not.

A couple of legal news publications were similarly baffled, although others confirmed the advert had run on their platforms as claimed.

When Skillburst complained, ALM produced a report which purported to show that the company's advert had run on ROF. According to the report, the ad collected 19 clicks and a paltry 5,088 impressions, at a cost of $7.02.

Law.com distanced itself from the mess once ROF got involved, telling Skillburst that the banner mock-up had been just for demonstration purposes. 

Richard Caruso, the SVP of legal products at ALM, told ROF that the partnership with iCrowdNewswire was the kind where his company “is merely a licensee of software, platforms, and systems developed by ICN, which provides all back-end fulfilment services”.

iCrowdNewswire took a different tack. Its President and CEO, Hector Botero, insisted that Skillburst’s advert had appeared on RollOnFriday.

“We placed ads on a variety of media sites including ROF”, he said, explaining that “we placed these ads through Google AdSense”.

Unfortunately for Botero that was impossible, because although Google's Adserve network places millions of ads on millions of sites, ROF isn’t one of them due to an aversion to easy money.

To back up his claim, Botero provided a screenshot of a marketing report produced by Google which showed the dodgy metrics.

The client named on the document was not iCrowdNewswire or Law.com or ALM, but Pixaco, a software development company based in Pakistan. ROF asked Botero if iCrowdNewswire had outsourced its work to Pixaco, and whether he laid the blame there for the fishy stats. He did not respond.

Meanwhile, Skillburst has not received its requested refund from iCrowdNewswire or Law.com, and ROF is still waiting for its slice of that sweet, sweet Google cash.