Madam, - Writers to the Irish Times Letters page must provide you with their name, postal address and telephone numbers. In addition you undoubtedly reject letters containing defamation and vulgar abuse.
Neither of these necessary precautions is applied in many ratings websites, as was pointed out in Conor Pope's article "Adding insult to injury" (Price Watch, September 25th). As a result, the website which purports to rate solicitors is the technological age equivalent of writing insults on the back of a toilet door. The anonymity of the comments robs them of any credibility or value.
There is no evidence that the venomous and personally abusive comments made about some solicitors are in fact made by clients or former clients of the solicitors in question. They could be made by anybody with a personal grudge, including the clients on the other side in litigation or family law cases where the solicitor being defamed in fact did too good a job as far as the disappointed and embittered "rater" is concerned.
The credibility of the website is reduced to zero when it is recognised that the top-mark ratings of solicitors by some deliriously happy clients can be, and no doubt in many cases have been, posted by the solicitors themselves.
The chairman of the Consumer Association of Ireland has described the way many of these sites are operating as a cause for concern. He points out that, where the postings are completely anonymous, someone with an agenda can try to blacken an innocent person's name.
No one should have their good name taken away by untrue and unfair statements about them. Whether such statements are made in newspapers or in cyberspace, the pain and loss they cause is the same. It is unacceptable that such websites - or "webspites" - should appear to operate beyond the rule of law.
Anyone seeking a solicitor should be highly sceptical of using a website that has been increasingly dominated by cowardly people with petty grudges. Instead they should seek a recommendation from someone they know and whose judgment they respect. - Yours, etc,
KEN MURPHY, Director General, Law Society of Ireland, Blackhall Place, Dublin 7.