Texas Rising Stars 2012

BRIEFS

Dean Gresham began handing out “attorney-at-law” business cards when he was 8 years old. Growing up with big plans in a little town, he drew inspiration from his uncle, a prominent maritime attorney in New York City.

“It was small-town Texas,” Gresham
says of his hometown of Jasper. “I always
wanted to move to the city and do
something important.”
Three decades later, Gresham, of
counsel at Payne Mitchell Law Group
in Dallas, is no longer typing his own
cards. At age 37, he has already faced off
against corporate giants such as Google
over “click-fraud” issues—in the Google
case, he, along with three other attorneys,
engineered a $90 million settlement in
2006. Gresham is now going toe-to-toe
with Toyota and GoDaddy.com.

The Google case was the first national class action filed for click fraud and Gresham has spent more hours studying the action than he cares to tally. There are two types of click fraud, he notes. In advertiser click fraud, a company intentionally clicks on its competitor’s ad in order to deplete that competitor’s daily advertising budget for its per-click fee, which is paid to Google. When the budget is drained, the competitor drops from the top spot in the search engine.

“Sometimes [a company’s competitor]
pays someone in India 20 rupees a day to
click all day on your ad,” Gresham says.

The other type of click fraud involves partner networks with websites that are portals for Google. When someone using one of these websites types in a keyword search then clicks on a sponsored link, the per-click fee paid by that advertiser is shared by Google and the partner.

IN THE WORLD OF CLICK-FRAUD INVESTIGATIONS, DEAN GRESHAM’S NAME IS AT THE TOP OF ANY SEARCH ENGINE BY BETH TAYLOR

WHEN A CLICK IS MORE THAN JUST A CLICK

Gresham got involved with the case after
the owners of Lane’s Gifts & Collectibles,
a gift shop in Texarkana, Ark., became
suspicious about clicks on their website.
“They were noticing all these strange hits
from China and Korea at 4 o’clock in the
morning, but they were just clicks,” Gresham
says. “People weren’t really browsing their
website or buying their items. … They were
Gresham and his team, which included
attorneys Stephen Malouf, Joel Fineberg
and John C. Goodson, went to work.

“We did a lot of research about how this works, and the algorithms that were used, and why someone would do this, and how you’re going to prove intent on a classwide basis,” Gresham says.

There was no shortage of advertisers wanting in on the case. “At the time we filed the lawsuit, we set up a website called Lostclicks.com, and it went off the charts with class members wanting to join,” he says.

The team made a strategic decision to
sue Google and Yahoo together (though
the Yahoo portion eventually was split off)
because of Arkansas’ unusually liberal
discovery rules. “We were able to get
documents from Google and from Yahoo
about their certain algorithms—we call it
their ‘secret sauce,’” says Gresham. “We
also got an order from the court in Miller
County, Arkansas, saying not only did
Google have to produce its secret sauce
to us—the plaintiff’s lawyers—but it also
had to share its secret sauce with Yahoo.
So strategically, that created this leverage
where Google basically said, ‘Look guys,
Upshot of the case? First, Google gave
its advertisers $60 million worth of free
advertising, divvied up in accordance with
how much they had spent in the past.

“Its conclusion was that, through the
lawsuit, Google had enhanced its click-
detection system drastically and made it
much more robust, and that advertisers
could truly rely on Google to use their best
efforts to detect click fraud,” says Gresham.
“That restored a sense of confidence that
if you’re going to pay Google so much per
click, you can rely that you’re going to get
legitimate clicks.”
At the moment, Gresham is taking on
the world’s largest Internet domain name
registrar, GoDaddy.com. The accusation:
cyber-trespass. It seems GoDaddy started
putting its own ads—then invited Google
to place click-ads—on domain names that
had been registered, but the websites had
not actually been built. As an example,
Gresham says, if he had a domain name that
was registered but not being used—but was
filled with ads—“If you click on one of those
ads, [the advertiser] is going to pay a dollar,
let’s say, and some of that money is going
to go to GoDaddy and some of it is going
to go to Google, but none of it goes to the
registrant of the domain name.” Gresham is
considering adding Google as a defendant.