So the same day I ponder the question of ethics opinions and antitrust, a lawsuit gets filed against the Florida Bar – alleging antitrust violations related to, in part, an advisory ethics opinion!
This will bear watching. The plaintiff in the case is “Tikd,” an innovative service that helps consumers get legal help – with highly predictable outcomes – when dealing with routine traffic tickets. And the lawyers for Tikd are Ray Abadin (who was President of the Florida Bar just a couple of years back) and Pete Kennedy, the Austin, TX antitrust lawyer who successfully represented LegalZoom and Zlien in various UPL fights with states bars.
The ethics opinion at issue apparently deals with both UPL and fee-splitting concerns with Tikd, and it’s not even clear the opinion even exists. But Tikd says its competitors are spreading the word that the opinion is out there, and the Bar isn’t disavowing it – or even meeting with Tikd to discuss the matter.
For the Florida Bar, this is yet another illustration of the problem with ethics opinions in areas involving competition and advertising. Bars are wired to give conservative advice, but what they really should be doing in these areas is not opining at all. Rather, they should flip the script and adopt a policy that affirmatively encourages innovation in the delivery of legal services, and only looks to enforce the Rules in reaction to evidence of public harm.
[…] While others have written about this new federal court lawsuit where TIKD is the plaintiff, and there is some decent media coverage of it at The Washington Post and in some Florida news outlets, I want to just flag for your attention the existence of another lawsuit in Florida involving TIKD, but that was brought against TIKD seven months earlier in state court by one of the defendants in the TIKD suit, The Ticket Clinic. […]