The Defendant Built a Website About Your Case. What Is It, and What Do You Do?

It is a standing communications operation, not a statement. A rebuttal site, often called a facts page or a resource center, is a page the defendant controls, updated every time a story or a verdict breaks, built to rank for the searches your claimants and the reporters covering the case will type. Nothing on it is filed with the court. It runs in the news cycle, aimed at jurors, regulators and the public. The first thing to do is read it the way a reporter will.

How to recognize one

A domain or a section of the corporate site named for the product, the incident or the litigation. A calm voice. Selected documents, often the ones that help. A timeline that starts where the defendant wants it to start. A media contact. Updates dated within days of each development in the case. In one consumer product case, a defendant answered an investigative report with full-page ads in national newspapers and a rebuttal site, still running, updated every time a new story or verdict broke.

What it is doing

Three things. Ranking: when a claimant or a reporter searches the product and the word lawsuit, the defendant wants its page above yours, and a well-built site gets there. Framing: the timeline and the selected documents set the account a reporter checks everything else against. Durability: a statement is a day; a site is the life of the case.

What to do about it

Read it in full and date-stamp it, because it will change. Note every claim that is answered by something already in the public record, and give reporters that record. Check where your own case page ranks for the same searches; if the defendant’s page is second and yours is ninth, that is a finding, and it is fixable with accurate, regular updates on the public status of the matter. Do not build a mirror site to argue with it. Build the better record, keep it current, and make sure the people who need it can find it. The Defense Check, which checks this → Who is running the defense’s communications →