The OCEA Independent Expenditure Committee sent out another mail piece yesterday against Shawn Nelson. The mailer hits Nelson again on the aggressive tactics Rizio & Nelson has used under Nelson’s management to attract high profile accused sex offenders as clients.
Last week, Shawn Nelson finally admitted to Jennifer Muir at the Orange County Register what he has been trying to hide for two years; that his firm has a criminal defense department. He admits removing that language from his web site. But he says it was there in the first place as a way to get a higher Google ranking on online searches, and he didn’t know about it. And his firm’s clients are not sex offenders or career criminals, he says. They’re your neighbors and family members who get in trouble for “small potatoes” crimes.
There is only one problem with Shawn Nelson’s “small potatoes” claim. Which of the more than 40 types of criminal offenses his firm sought to represent potential clients for does Mr. Nelson consider “small potatoes”? Is an accused drunk driver who kills 3 people “small potatoes?” Is an accused embezzler who steals the life savings of an 80 year old woman “small potatoes?” I think you get the point.
The issue here is not that Nelson’s firm, and by extension Nelson himself as managing partner, represents people in criminal matters. It’s that he has spent the better part of two years trying to cover that up. Soon after I reported on Nelson’s previous web advertising, Nelson paid off the archive company that had recorded his advertising to make that history disappear.