On 25 February 2014 I was the guest speaker at a Tech-Tax evening at Google Campus, London, organised by TechHub and DGIT, the digital arm of the accountants Davis Grant. The evening was pitched at founders: you have had the big idea, researched the market and taken the leap, and then, in among the long hours, the networking and the free pizza, there is suddenly a tax return, a legal battle or a key team member gone. Tax, talent and the law of the internet all featured.
What the talk covered
My part was reputation management law for start-ups. As the internet matures, the reach of the law and of responsibility increases with it, and the question I put to the room was a practical one: how would you handle a libel claim moving at the speed of tweets? A young company has a reputation that is small, new and easily damaged, and the people who decide whether to fund it, work for it or buy from it will search for it before they do. The themes were the ones that still bring founders to my door: what to do when a former employee, a competitor or a customer publishes something false and damaging; how the law treats review websites and the people who post on them; when a company can sue and when it cannot; and why speed matters more than almost anything else once something damaging is online.
Those themes are covered in more depth in the articles on this site: Defamation against a company: why you need to act within days, Are review websites liable for defamatory reviews? and Getting disclosure orders against internet trolls. My clients at the time included companies listed on the London Stock Exchange as well as start-ups looking for creative and effective solutions to internet law problems and online reputation issues, and that mix has not changed.
First published 10 March 2014. Reviewed and updated 28 September 2026.