Time to Gut the Ad Rules

Avvo recently submitted its comments to the ABA’s “Future of Legal Services” Commission, and I wanted to highlight one of the specific suggestions we made:

Get rid of most attorney advertising regulation.

Or more specifically, eliminate everything other than restrictions on false advertising and real-time solicitation. Our suggested advertising rules would look like this:

Rule 7.1: A lawyer shall not make a false or misleading communication about the lawyer or the lawyer’s services.

Rule 7.2:  A lawyer shall not by in‑person, live telephone or real-time electronic contact solicit professional employment when a significant motive for the lawyer’s doing so is the lawyer’s pecuniary gain, unless the person contacted:

(1)  is a lawyer; or

(2)  has a family, close personal, or prior professional relationship with the lawyer.

Everything else in the attorney advertising rules – prohibitions on specific forms of advertising, hard-and-fast disclaimer requirements, vague provisions about “lawyer referral services” and the like – is the crusty accretion of over-regulation. Many of these provisions pre-date Bates v. Arizona, and would be contrary to lawyers’ First Amendment right to advertise were it not for some begrudging exceptions language that’s been bolted on.

Other provisions found in the RPCs of many states, such as pre-review of advertising (by a committee that may include a law firm’s competitors) and limitations on many forms of legitimate advertising, are fundamentally anti-competitive and often highly arbitrary in application.

As anyone who pays close attention to this area knows, there is absolutely nothing in this dog’s breakfast of regulations that actually buys us any greater consumer protection.[ref]And consumers rarely complain about lawyer advertising violations; virtually all such complaints are filed by other lawyers.[/ref] Anything egregious and harmful in attorney communication can be enforced via the general prohibition on false and misleading advertising.

What’s more, this thicket of regulation is actively harmful. I’ve spoken with hundreds, if not thousands, of attorneys over the last seven years about this topic. There is a general level of concern and uncertainty over what attorneys are “permitted” to say to potential clients. And lawyers, being the risk adverse creatures they are, tend to clam up.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly noted in some two dozen advertising cases over the last 40 years that consumers have a very strong interest in minimally restrained commercial speech. As the court observed in Bates:

[T]he consumer’s concern for the free flow of commercial speech often may be far keener than his concern for urgent political dialogue.

And yet, the Bar restrictions, with their often-byzantine level of detail and apparent reach into all manner of attorney speech, are preventing attorneys from providing consumers with the robustness of information necessary to make good purchasing decisions – or to get legal help at all. This is bad for consumers, and ultimately, bad for the Bar.

While there are other things that the profession can do to improve access to justice, one immediate and easy opportunity for improvement is to massively prune back attorney advertising regulation.