Houston Lawyers Create Facebook Page to Gripe About Clerk's Office
In his first post on the new page, lawyer Scott Rothenberg wrote, “So you think you can stop attorneys from posting about the HCDC? Guess again!”
June 10, 2019 at 10:22 AM
4 minute read
The original version of this story was published on Texas Lawyer
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An angry mob of Simpsons townspeople, marching through the streets with flaming torches in hand, adorns the cover of a new lawyer-created Facebook group about the Harris County District Clerk's Office.
The group, called “HCDC—We're Not Going to Take It!,” sprang up overnight and gathered more than 200 members during a brief time from Thursday evening to Friday morning. Houston attorney Scott Rothenberg created the group because around 5 p.m. on Thursday, an administrator of the clerk's office official page for lawyers, “Harris County District Clerk's Legal Community Connection,” started prohibiting attorneys from writing new entries and commenting on existing posts. The change was short-lived, though. As of Friday morning, the settings were back to normal.
Previously, attorneys were posting to the Legal Community Connection page about concerns and complaints about the office's operations, centered around delayed citations, e-filing rejections, bills for clients' past-due costs and fees, and other odd-ball clerk errors.
Legal Community Connection was a valuable resource for lawyers to post their concerns and get the clerk's office to resolve problems, said Rothenberg. He disagreed with the page turning off posting and commenting.
“I thought that's really unfortunate because it's going to diminish communication,” Rothenberg said. “I thought, 'We're not going to take it'—and that's where the page came from.”
In his first post on the new page, Rothenberg wrote, “So you think you can stop attorneys from posting about the HCDC? Guess again!”
But Harris County Chief Deputy Clerk Judith Snively said it was a mistake to turn off Legal Community Connection's comments.
It grew difficult for multiple clerk's office employees to monitor and respond to comments on the Legal Community Connection group. During a meeting, Snively said staffers agreed that it would streamline the process if attorneys called or emailed clerks directly for help, rather than going through Facebook. The office posted a listing of office contacts for lawyers to call.
Snively said a communications staffer misunderstood and thought she was supposed to turn off commenting on Legal Community Connection, and made the changes to the settings. Harris County District Clerk Marilyn Burgess learned about the changes late last night, Snively said.
“She did not authorize that change,” Snively said. “This morning, she came in and said, 'Put it back just the way that it was.'”
The changes to the Legal Connection Community page started around 4:45 p.m. on Thursday, said Emily Hull, a family law attorney at the Haston Law Firm in Houston, who was on Facebook and started seeing notifications about the changes.
An administrator changed the group's settings from a “closed group,” which means people can search for it but need an invitation from a current member to join, to a “secret group,” which means it doesn't come up in search results. Another settings change required new posts to obtain an administrator's approval prior to publication.
The group's “about” page was also edited to delete a sentence that said the office welcomed questions and feedback from members.
Also, someone turned off the ability to comment on existing posts.
Hull, who helped Rothenberg create the “We're Not Going to Take It!” page, said attorneys generally get “testy” about free speech issues because they know the law says government officials are allowed to place certain time, place and manner restrictions on speech, but they can't target the content of speech.
“She didn't like the content of the speech,” Hull said about the clerk. “She's regulating content. That's the problem.”
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