Florida Continues the Over-Regulatory Spiral

Last week, I wrote about the decision of the New Jersey Committee on Attorney Advertising doubling down on compelled speech (around attorney “accolade” advertising), despite a recent Third Circuit decision noting that such regulation must be carefully and narrowly crafted in order to not offend the First Amendment.

This week brings news of a similar sort of decision out of Florida. Last year, a federal district court ruled that Florida’s prohibition on attorneys using terms such as “specialist” and “expert” to describe their practices – unless certified as such by the Florida Bar or an ABA-certified entity – violated the First Amendment. I’ve long railed on this issue; such restrictions are either lazy or overly-broad interpretations of the Supreme Court’s Peel decision (which simply noted that states can restrict attorneys from falsely stating that they’ve been certified as specialists).

So did the Florida Bar respond by getting rid of its unconstitutional restriction? Pshaw! Of course not.

Rather, the Bar’s Board of Governors has approved a slight change to its rules, adding a new section (D) to Florida’s Rule of Professional Conduct 4-7.14(a)(4):

(D) the lawyer’s experience and training demonstrate specialized competence in the advertised area of practice that is reasonably comparable to that demonstrated by the standards of the Florida Certification Plan set forth in chapter 6 of these rules and, if the area of claimed specialization or expertise is or falls within an area of practice under the Florida Certification Plan, the advertisement includes a reasonably prominent disclaimer that the lawyer is not board certified in that area of practice by The Florida Bar or another certification program if the lawyer is not board certified in that area of practice.

Translation: if you want to say that you “specialize” or have “expertise” in a particular area, be prepared to demonstrate that you’ve got the goods sufficient to be certified by the Bar  . . . assuming the Bar chose to have a certification in your area. How you’d demonstrate that is anyone’s guess.

And if you want to use one of these words to describe your abilities with respect to an area the Bar DOES certify (which includes such broad areas as “civil trial,” “real estate,” “business litigation,” and “criminal trial”), you’re compelled to include a self-abnegating disclaimer.

Why the Bar didn’t take the Court’s strong direction and just get rid of its rule is anyone’s guess. Nothing would have prevented it from so doing while still aggressively going after any attorney who either a) falsely claimed expertise or b) falsely claimed to be certified as a specialist. Either is a form of misleading advertising, easily sanctioned under even the most basic of attorney advertising rules (ABA Model Rule 7.1, which is, honestly, all the attorney advertising regulation we really need).

Will this new rule survive First Amendment scrutiny? The answer is almost certainly no, for the same reasons the court showed the Bar the back of its hand on the last go-round. But until that happens, Florida lawyers will have to think about regulation even when making commonplace expressions of competence.

h/t Joseph Corsmeier