Law firms ego-surf.

For individuals, “ego-surfing” is plugging your own name into Google and seeing how many times your name shows up on the web.

For law firms, ego-surfing is only slightly different.

A law firm’s public relations folks will plug the firm’s name into Google to see what people are saying on-line about the firm.

But it gets better. At many law firms, the ego-surfing is automatic: law firms set up “Google Alerts” to advise people automatically when the firm’s name is used on-line. The Google Alerts send to lawyers’ desktops a notice that the law firm was named on-line, a short snippet of the text surrounding the use of the firm’s name (so the recipient of the Alert can make an informed decision whether to explore further), and a link to the website that contained the name.

This post is our own personal experiment in ego-surfing. We’re about to post the names of four large law firms, surrounded by text that is likely to sound intriguing to lawyers at those firms. We’ll then watch the results to see whether (1) we draw a surprising number of visitors from those firms over the next few days, and (2) whether any of those visitors are interested in pharmaceutical product liability defense and thus become regular readers. If the results are interesting, we’ll let you know.

Here’s the game:

1. DLA Piper has, seemingly out of nowhere, created one of the great mass tort defense practices in the world.

2. Kaye Scholer, which has long represented Pfizer, has achieved noteworthy victories in recent years.

3. Kirkland & Ellis, home to more than its share of superstar litigators, particularly in the fields of class action and mass tort defense . . . .

4. O’Melveny & Myers, one of the leading class action defense firms in the world . . . .

Well, let’s not get carried away here.

The Drug and Device Law Blog extends a warm welcome to our new visitors from DLA Piper, Kaye Scholer, Kirkland, and O’Melveny. This blog contains its hosts personal views about the defense of pharmaceutical and medical device product liability cases (and, often, about the defense of complex litigation generally). The posts before and after this one are better examples than this one of the usual fare at this blog.

For the rest of you, we’ll let you know what, if anything, we learn from this experiment in ego-surfing.

Thanks for bearing with us as we entertained ourselves. Back to drug and device law momentarily.