I just saw this article in the Wall Street Journal on First Amendment challenges to how lawyers are allowed to advertise. In short, lawyers hold themselves to higher standards than most other professions when it comes to ads. I’m sure this was rooted in notions of propriety that go back a long way, possibly even to English legal culture. But the culture of the law changes very slowly. Thus, we have state bar rules from around the country that forbid advertisements that use threatening images, background sounds, suspense, and in South Carolina, “puffery or hucksterism.” According to the article, Florida is among the strictest:
But the Florida bar isn’t buckling. It filed a complaint in 2004 against Fort Lauderdale personal-injury attorney Marc Andrew Chandler over ads that featured a pit bull wearing a spiked collar. The Florida Supreme Court sided with the bar in 2005, ruling that pit bulls conjure up images of viciousness. “Were we to approve,” the court wrote, “images of sharks, wolves, crocodiles, and piranhas could follow.”
Oh no! Advertisements with piranhas!
One thing the article didn’t point out, which piqued my interest, is that all the lawyers involved in disputes over advertisements are personal injury lawyers. The plaintiffs’ bar is far from the only group of lawyers that regularly takes out ads, as those of us who work in the legal media know. I was reminded in particular of an advertisement by Bingham McCutchen that got attention by putting a baby in a bear’s arms. I’m not criticizing Bingham for this (in fact, I commend their advertising agency’s cleverness), but I wonder if they were allowed to run it in Florida.
Don’t get me wrong; I really like it that lawyers feel a higher sense of personal responsibility than other professions. That sense of responsibility gives us pro bono work, free lawyer referral services and the really excellent California self-help center for consumers. And I’m not a big fan of bad lawyers, or even worse, people who are not lawyers but take poor people’s money by pretending to be lawyers. But it’s a bit old-fashioned and silly to spend energy cracking down on semi-sensationalistic ads, especially when I could turn on my TV and see much worse. Or as a lawyer who’s suing the Florida bar said: “The established legal bar pines for the Eisenhower era.”
2 Comments
February 6, 2008 at 9:17 pm
I just read about a case the other day where a Girls Gone Wild girl was suing over being used in commercials and on the box cover (and, presumably, in the video). She even has an IMDB page:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1257293/
This isn’t at all what you were discussing, but your title reminded me of her.
February 11, 2008 at 9:51 pm
I really really really want to see an ad by Morrison & Foerster using Samuel L. Jackson.