Author: Josh King

North Carolina Defeats First Amendment Defense to UPL

Josh King1 Comment

North Carolina – which has one of the most specific definitions of “the practice of law” going – has just won an unlicensed practice of law victory over an association that wanted to provide legal services to its members.

The outcome wasn’t a huge shock; North Carolina, like all states, prohibits non-lawyers from practicing law. As the association (whose ostensible purpose was to provide legal advice and counsel to small and mid-sized employers) is a corporation, it can’t practice law. That also means it can’t hire lawyers to provide legal services to the public. Easy win.

But in getting to this outcome, North Carolina had to overcome an objection that’s rarely seen: that the state’s UPL restrictions violate the First Amendment.

There’s a tension between professional regulation and the First Amendment, for much of “the practice of law” involves expressive acts. But while this has been heavily litigated in the professional advertising context, there’s been precious little judicial guidance where “occupational speech” regulation is concerned.

So it’s notable that this case addresses the issue, and perhaps understandable that the decision would botch the analysis so badly.

How’s that? The North Carolina case cites to a recent Fourth Circuit decision, Moore-King v. County of Chesterfield[ref]708 F.3d 560 (4th Cir. 2013).[/ref] for the proposition that professional regulation of speech is not subject to the First Amendment.

That’s quite obviously wrong. Even regulation of professional advertising speech is subject to First Amendment scrutiny. And there have been a number of cases recently involving regulation of doctors’ speech while treating patients – those cases have taken First Amendment coverage as a given, even as they wrestled with whether intermediate or strict scrutiny of the regulations should apply.

In fact, the Moore-King case involved a licensing requirement for fortune-tellers, and it stands for a much more limited proposition than that adopted by the District Court in North Carolina: that “generally applicable licensing provisions” don’t raise First Amendment concerns. This in no way means that all professional regulation is outside the scope of the First Amendment.

What’s more, not even all licensing requirements get a pass from First Amendment scrutiny. The Fourth Circuit in Moore-King takes pains to distinguish the County’s straightforward licensing requirements from regulations that banned the sale of fortune-telling services, and also notes that the government does not have “carte blanche” in creating these regulations.

None of which is to say that the  North Carolina court reached the wrong decision – it likely did. The Bar has a generally applicable licensing scheme, and it’s hard to imagine that a wholesale challenge to the practice of licensing lawyers would ever succeed. But it’s important to recognize the limits of this occupational licensing exception, and reinforce the fact that attorneys do not check their First Amendment rights at the door as the price of being called to the Bar.

Finally, while the legality of a license requirement for attorneys may be a settled question, the same cannot be said for the contours of that legal monopoly. For it’s one thing to have a generally applicable licensing requirement before people can represent others in court, but it’s quite another to extend that requirement to any and all who would sell advice and counseling on matters that seem “legal.”  Most in the legal profession take it for a given that such “legal advice” is restricted to the monopoly of lawyers, but that seems far from clear given the First Amendment issues in play.[ref]And watch the Institute for Justice, which is litigating several cases involving First Amendment challenges to occupational licensing restrictions. The latest of these – just filed in Florida – deals with restrictions on providing compensated dietary advice.[/ref]

SF “Soda Warning” Law Nixed

Josh King1 Comment

Sugar-water-purveyors and nanny-state-haters alike can cheer: San Francisco’s disclaimer requirement for soda advertisers has been killed off by the Ninth Circuit.

What kind of disclaimer? A prominent box containing this text:

WARNING: Drinking beverages with added
sugar(s) contributes to obesity, diabetes, and
tooth decay. This is a message from the City
and County of San Francisco.

Your tax dollars at work, San Francisco!

I’m not a big soda drinker, but my interest is the compelled speech angle – the attorney ad rules are replete with disclaimer requirements. In fact, the seminal Supreme Court case on compelled speech (Zauderer v. Office of Disciplinary Counsel) involved attorney advertising.

The opinion striking San Francisco’s law (American Beverage Assn. v. City and County of San Francisco) offers a terrific overview of the compelled speech doctrine. And as the opinion notes, the state has wide latitude to compel advertisers to “speak” uncontroversial facts – as long as that compulsion isn’t too burdensome.

In analyzing the San Francisco ordinance, the Ninth Circuit opinion does a neat little flip of Zauderer, where “technically truthful” advertising was found to still be deceptive because it omitted key information:

Applying this principle to disclosure requirements, a literally
true but misleading disclosure creates the possibility of
consumer deception.

Nice! The decision goes on to find that while the the San Francisco warning is technically true – there is a consensus, at the population level, that added sugar contributes to obesity, etc. – it also suggests that this is true at the individual level, “regardless of the quantity consumed or other lifestyle choices.” And as such, the disclaimer is at best a “disputed policy view.” As the court notes:

Zauderer does not allow the state to require corporations to provide one-sided or misleading messages, or to use their own property to convey an antagonistic ideological message.

The court also found that the disclosure requirement was unduly burdensome, as the disclaimer would have comprised 20% of subject advertisements. And, interestingly, it didn’t even bother with a second level of analysis to see if the more exacting intermediate scrutiny test would save San Francisco’s law – it simply gave the law the kibosh.

In any event, the opinion is nice exposition of the constitutional test in this often-confusing area. And what’s more, it offers something for state bar regulators to keep in mind when thinking about the viability of their own disclaimer requirements.

September Notes: Fee-splitting, burner devices, and more judicial “friends.”

Josh King

The Fight Over Judicial “Friends” Continues.  A Florida case highlighted in last month’s newsletter has been decided, with the outcome being that a Miami judge does not need to recuse herself merely because she is Facebook “friends” with counsel for one of the litigants. As the unanimous court of appeals decision notes, “the degree of intimacy among Facebook ‘friends’ varies greatly.” No kidding, right? As anyone who has used Facebook for more than a hot second knows, one’s “friends” can range from BFFs to people you haven’t seen or talked to in years. Absent further evidence of potential bias, a Facebook friendship between judges and counsel shouldn’t even be worthy of mention as grounds for recusal. Still, lawyers being lawyers, you can expect to keep hearing about this “issue” for quite some time.

Some States Look to Modernize Fee-Splitting Rules. Rule 5.4 of the ABA Model Rules prevents lawyers from splitting fees with non-lawyers. This rule is really a form of conflict prevention, designed – as the title of the rule itself notes – to preserve the professional independence of lawyers. But the Rule’s rigid language hasn’t aged well. Accepting credit cards for legal fees results in a technical violation of Rule 5.4 every time the credit card processor takes their 3% “split” of the fee. While this issue has been largely ignored, Bars are struggling with innovative new services and the growing adoption of performance-based marketing (in which advertisers pay per customer, rather than per-impression or per-click). But some states are starting to take action. North Carolina and Oregon are taking different approaches, but both have proposed amendments to their fee-splitting rules that should take effect before the end of 2017. These changes preserve the public-protective purpose of the rules while easing up on the rigid technical limitations.

Do Lawyers Need “Burner” Devices When Traveling Overseas? The ABA Journal profiles an interesting issue for jet-setting lawyers: protecting client files when returning from travel abroad. While foreign snooping and theft are the more obvious concerns, there’s also the fact that lawyers have no meaningful Fourth Amendment protection from search when re-entering the country. That’s enough to cause some law firms to require attorneys to use “burner” devices – laptops containing no client data – when traveling overseas. Is that something that all globe-trotting lawyers should emulate? After all, this is an edge case risk for the vast majority of lawyers. But taking some simple precautions when traveling – like putting all of your client data in the cloud – offers protection from both far-out risks like this one and the more likely hazard of device loss or compromise. For while tech never fails to create fascinating new issues to explore, paying attention to good old physical security remains a lawyer’s primary means of protecting client data.

Social Media News and Notes:

If you MUST travel overseas with client files, perhaps consider using an encrypted flash drive.

Nebraska becomes the 28th state to add “technological competence” to a lawyer’s ethical obligations.

Ohio Supreme Court justice takes to Facebook to blast Browns players for kneeling during national anthem.

No, the Facial Validity of Ad Rules Doesn’t Get Ethics Committees Off the Hook

Josh King

As I’ve often noted, I take a dim view of ethics opinions that don’t consider the First Amendment implications when dealing with lawyer advertising. I mean, it’s a pretty important thing, the First Amendment, right? And as the First Amendment drives the boundaries of the rules, it . . . seems like a big miss to not pay attention to it.

In response to my making this point during a talk earlier this week, the objection was raised that the rules are just fine; they’ve been tested in court and found to be constitutional. Case closed; ethics committees needn’t worry about anything other than considering how far the rules might be stretched to prohibit various attorney conduct.

I didn’t have the opportunity to respond to this curious argument, but given the bona fides of the attorney who made it (an eminent and smart lawyer, who shall go nameless here), I suspect this argument may have more currency than I would have thought. So, a quick little First Amendment lesson:

IT DOESN’T MATTER if the Rules have already been found to be Constitutional.

Hell, if they hadn’t been so found, they would no longer be the Rules.

In First Amendment law there are “facial” and “as-applied” challenges to rules. The former argues that a law is unconstitutional on its face; it is not possibly amenable to a constitutional interpretation. The latter – which is far more common – argues that the law has been unconstitutionally applied in a particular case.

So the fact that Bar advertising Rules may have survived previous constitutional challenges is only relevant to the extent one is interpreting similar applications of the rule. It is not remotely a clean bill of Constitutional health to all applications of the rule, and certainly not an excuse for ethics committees to turn a blind eye to First Amendment parameters when opining on speech-impacting rules.

I realize, too, that this makes the jobs of ethics committees more difficult. But given the costs to the public and the bar imposed by overreaching opinions in this area, they need to either do this work or get out of the business of issuing ethics opinions on lawyer advertising.

August Notes: All About the Judges

Josh King

Judges: Social Media on Their Minds. As social media gets both more commonplace and mature, it’s natural that even judges will be using the stuff. I mean, it’s not like we’re going to require that newly-minted jurists relinquish all access to cat videos, dank memes, and food photos, right? However, as this discussion with several prolific judicial users of social media shows, the rules of the road for how judges should think about social media issues are still far from being sorted out. Some litigants will parse all corners of a judge’s social media trail, looking for indications of bias – even in areas as innocuous as the accounts a judge follows on twitter. For social media-savvy judges like the Texas Supreme Court’s Don Willett and Georgia Court of Appeals Chief Judge Stephen Dillard, engaging on social media requires a high level of attention: no commenting whatsoever on pending matters, and steering clear of political controversies.

But Even a Judge’s “Friends” Can be Problematic. Most of us know by now that a “friend” on Facebook is not the same as a “friend” in real life. Depending on the standards we choose to use, our Facebook “friends” may include casual acquaintances, business associates, and people we haven’t seen or spoken to in decades. But the unfortunate familiarity of Facebook’s chosen term has caused no end of consternation for judges, who seem to face regular recusal motions because they happen to be Facebook “friends” with counsel appearing before them (here’s the latest example). It’s all part of the continuing inability of the bar to get that social media is simply an extension of things we do in real life. If judges can banter and share canapes with counsel at Bench-and-Bar events, why can’t they be Facebook “friends?”

Blogging Not a Showstopper for Judicial Nominee. As with twitter and Facebook, it was only going to be a matter of time before some blogging lawyers would be up for judgeships. Case in point: Kentucky attorney John Bush, nominated for a seat on the 6th Circuit, who had posted hundreds of political and contentious posts pseudonymously on the blog “Elephants in the Bluegrass.” Among these were posts sympathetic to “birther” claims about Barack Obama and others deeply critical of abortion rights. However, by differentiating between the political nature of his speech as a private citizen and the obligations he would undertake as a federal judge, Bush was able to win over enough votes – he was narrowly confirmed by the Senate in late July.

Social Media News and Notes:

No, says the 9th Circuit, a judge tweeting a news item is NOT grounds for recusal.

Texas judge under fire for venting on Facebook about being “tortured” by counsel.

And litigants? Beware of judges watching YOUR social media activity.

More Ethics Opinions on Avvo Legal Services

Josh King2 Comments

I recently returned from lovely Asheville, North Carolina, where the North Carolina State Bar moved to adopt an ethics opinion favorable to Avvo Legal Services. The Bar also proposed changes to the fee-sharing and trust account rules to specify that mechanical-but-not-client-impacting payments to intermediaries (the bugaboo of too many regulators) are not prohibited under the Rules of Professional Conduct.

The North Carolina EO and Rule Changes – which are moving forward for final comments and, one hopes, adoption – are the culmination of what has been a model process. The Bar appointed a subcommittee to address the issue, and that group took its time. It held numerous meetings, and got input from all corners to understand the issues. The subcommittee also brought to bear a deep understanding of both the public-protection purpose of the Rules, and the constitutional constraints which govern them.

And then there’s the New York State Bar Association.

The NYSBA announced today that it has issued an ethics opinion finding that Avvo Legal Services violates New York’s rules of professional conduct – specifically, the prohibition against lawyers paying third parties to recommend them.

Unlike the North Carolina State Bar, the NYSBA is a voluntary, non-regulatory legal trade association. It opinions are purely advisory. But New York is a big and influential state, and lawyers are sure to have questions about this opinion. And while the NYSBA didn’t run a transparent and public process like North Carolina’s, it did – to its credit – actually take the time to understand how Avvo Legal Services works.

But they still came to the wrong conclusion.

As in most states, the New York Rules of Professional Conduct prohibits lawyers from paying for “recommendations.” The NYSBA opinion finds that attorneys participating in Avvo Legal Services are making “improper payment for a recommendation in violation of Rule 7.2(a).” Yet in reaching this conclusion, the NYSBA stretches the term “recommendation” far beyond its permissible bounds.

As I am constantly going on about, there are First Amendment limitations on the Rules of Professional Conduct. Attorneys have a right to express themselves, and the public has a right to access information about legal services. What this means in practice is that the Rules can’t mean whatever the regulators want them to mean. It means that the Rules can’t be interpreted to broadly gather in anything that might arguably sound like it could “fit” under the rules.

More specifically, attorney advertising restrictions must:

  • Materially advance important state interests, and
  • Do so in a narrow fashion.

That’s not my opinion; it’s the law.

The NYSBA opinion doesn’t grapple with these obvious Constitutional guardrails. Instead, it basically says:

“Hey, if you squint hard enough, and add together Avvo’s objective system of lawyer ratings plus some marketing statements Avvo uses to refer to lawyers in general, that looks kinda like a “recommendation” of every participating lawyer.”

That’s far, far too broad. To survive First Amendment scrutiny, a prohibition on recommendations must be narrowly limited to those recommendations that actually mislead the public. And the NYSBA opinion acknowledges this in passing, noting its earlier Opinion 799, which found that the “recommendation” line is crossed when the referrer “purports to recommend a particular lawyer or lawyers based on an analysis of the potential client’s problem.”

This is getting at the issue, because such a recommendation – particularly in the absence of transparency and consumer choice – can lead the consumer to believe they are being sent to the best possible attorney for their legal problem, when in fact they are being sent to the one paying the most money.

But instead, the opinion treats “recommendation” as a broad-ranging term into which anything bearing a passing resemblance can fit. That’s not a stand that will survive its first encounter with judicial review.

And this is yet more evidence of a far too common pattern: applying the prophylactic, overly-cautious ethics opinion approach to rules where the Constitution dictates a much lighter hand. It’s a continuation of a decades-long habit of chilling lawyer speech, to the detriment of consumers and lawyers alike.

Why New Jersey Gets it Wrong on Avvo Legal Services

Josh King

OK, so one of the last things I read work-wise, before going off the grid to chase after Amelia Earhart in Kiribati for three weeks, was this joint opinion by three committees of the New Jersey Supreme Court taking issue with Avvo Legal Services.[ref]This trio included the Advisory Committee on Professional Ethics, the Committee on Attorney Advertising, and the Committee on the Unauthorized Practice of Law.[/ref]

I’ve long lambasted the issuance of regulatory ethics opinions on matters related to attorney speech. The principle behind prophylactic ethics opinions – “err on the side of caution when interpreting the ethics rules” – fits very poorly with the First Amendment principles protecting access to information about legal services. Unless regulators engage with these principles, they are doing the bar and the public a disservice whenever issuing advisory opinions in this area.

That said, this New Jersey opinion is better than some on this front, as it addresses the fee-splitting bogeyman head-on. And in so doing, the Committees conclude that Avvo Legal Services “does not insert itself into the legal consultation in a manner that would interfere with the lawyer’s independent professional judgment.” We agree. And this is an important point, as the animating principle behind Rule 5.4 – which prohibits the splitting of fees – is the protection of the attorney’s independent professional judgment.

However, there are three big ways in which New Jersey arrived at the wrong conclusion:

Incoherence on Fee-Splitting

There are two ways of thinking about fee-splitting: let’s call the first the “mechanistic” formulation, and the second the “principled” formulation.

In the former, any agreement to split a legal fee violates the rule. You don’t need to look beyond the terms of the transaction; if the fee is getting split, the rule is violated.

In the latter, the focus is not on the mechanics of the transaction, but on the reality of the arrangement. If the deal with a non-lawyer third party puts the lawyer’s independent professional responsibility at risk, the rule is violated.

So in the “principled” formulation, regulators will look past some technical fee splits (e.g., credit card processing fees) because they do not risk conflicts. And in the “mechanistic” formulation, regulators will look past some conflict-laden business deals (e.g., cross-referral arrangements) because they do not technically involve the splitting of a legal fee.

As Avvo Legal Services does not involve the splitting of a fee – the entire fee is paid to the attorney, and the attorney pays Avvo a separate marketing fee – it shouldn’t run afoul of New Jersey’s rule unless the state follows the “principled” formulation and finds that our program conflicts with the professional independence of lawyer participants.

New Jersey didn’t do that; in fact, it explicitly found that Avvo Legal Services does not create such interference. Yet the opinion still finds that Avvo Legal Services constitutes prohibited fee-splitting. Why?

It’s possible that the New Jersey Committees didn’t fully understand how Avvo Legal Services works. They may have assumed – incorrectly – that Avvo deducts its marketing fee from the legal fee prior to passing it through to the attorney.

However, the rest of the opinion leads me to believe that the Committees are grasping at something more amorphous: a free-floating finding of fee-sharing in the absence of either a technical fee-split OR an indication of risk to a lawyer’s independent professional judgment.

Such a principle would be incoherent and dangerous. It risks subjecting ANY expenditure of money by an attorney to the whims of the regulators. Because ALL legal fees are “shared” at some point. They get shared with landlords, office supply vendors, secretaries, plant waterers, brass polishers, and software programmers. And they get shared in rough proportion to their size because with more legal fees there are more goods and services for lawyers to buy.

New Jersey seems to want to have the leeway to apply Rule 5.4 to any transaction it sees fit. But regulation doesn’t work that way: Rule 5.4 is either violated via the letter of the rule (“no sharing of a legal fee”), or via the spirit of the rule (“no third party deals that put attorney independence at risk”). So how can Avvo Legal Services be a problem when it involves neither of these?

What’s a “Lawyer Referral Service?”

New Jersey prohibits attorneys from participating in for-profit lawyer referral services, and the opinion finds that Avvo Legal Services constitutes just such an “impermissible attorney referral service.” Why? Because the marketing fee charged by Avvo Legal Services is based on the legal services provided to the client who Avvo has connected with the attorney.

There’s no analysis of why such a structure is bad for clients, or even how such “cost per action” payment for marketing makes Avvo Legal Services a “lawyer referral service.” As I’ve long pointed out – but as the New Jersey Committees only tacitly acknowledge in the opinion – the key definition of a “lawyer referral service” is the existence of consumer deception inherent in “steering” a potential client to a particular lawyer. And there are actually some ethics opinions that lay this out pretty clearly, including this one:

“Opinion 13 set forth three factors for distinguishing between impermissible referral services and advertising. The first factor is whether the marketer limits access to information or whether, like a “Yellow Pages” directory, the entire list of participating attorneys is available to the consumer. The second factor is whether the marketer, explicitly or implicitly, guides consumers to a specific attorney. In contrast to directories such as “Yellow Pages,” a referral service “is a directing intermediary, not just an encounter between the consumer and the passive information made available by the attorney.” The third factor is whether the marketer serves a public purpose (providing information about attorneys or putting people in touch with attorneys) or primarily a commercial purpose.”

The state issuing that guidance? New Jersey.[ref]See N.J. CAA Opinion 43 (June 2011).[/ref]

Avvo Legal Services has no such opacity or guidance of consumers to a particular attorney; consumers are free to choose from any participating attorney. And New Jersey doesn’t conclude differently. Its opinion simply declares that the cost-per-action nature of Avvo’s marketing fee renders the program a disqualified lawyer referral service. As shown below, that’s not how this whole “lawfully interpreting the rules” business works.

Blowing Off the First Amendment

The opinion includes this gem:

“The First Amendment does not protect lawyers who seek to participate in prohibited attorney referral programs or engage in impermissible fee sharing.”

That’s glaringly wrong. It’s not a question of “protecting” lawyers; it’s a question of how the Constitution dictates that speech-impacting Rules of Professional Conduct be interpreted.

Prohibiting attorneys from participating in lawyer referral services is a form of commercial speech regulation. This means such a prohibition must meet the Central Hudson requirements of necessity and narrowness.

So the New Jersey Bar can’t simply say that lawyers can’t participate in lawyer referral services, and it can’t define “lawyer referral service” so broadly that the term captures ANY new form of marketing that the Bar isn’t entirely comfortable with. The Bar must show a significant government interest driving its rule, and it also must show that its regulation advances that interest in a minimally-speech-restrictive fashion.

The rationale for a special restriction on lawyer referral services has been – as New Jersey’s earlier Opinion 43 and other such opinions note – that such services present a special risk to the public, characterized as they are by a lack of transparency and directive conduct.

That’s fine, but the rule always must be interpreted in light of the limited box in which it sits (i.e., constraining a specifically problematic set of deceptive marketing practices). So if New Jersey is going to find that Avvo Legal Services is a lawyer referral service prohibited to New Jersey attorneys, it’s got to make an empirical finding that something about our program fits within this rationale. Similarly, if New Jersey is going to find that a form of advertising is off-limits because of the method of payment, that conclusion must also be supported by evidence that the practice is harmful to the public.

The New Jersey Committees don’t remotely do that. Rather, their opinion simply concludes that the First Amendment doesn’t apply here.

Such a position ignores the copious volume of cases laying out how the First Amendment limits attorney advertising regulation. And integral to those limits is the recognition of the importance of consumer access to justice and information about legal services. Opinions like this one – which flout these Constitutional limits in seeking to impose broader restrictions – run contrary to both the law and the purpose of the rules.

Welcome Back From the Jungle

Josh King

My father is an archaeologist; he’s spent years working in the Pacific, and I spent a summer as a child trolling around places like Saipan, Chuuk, and Pohnpei. When I was in college, my dad took on a project to try and solve the mystery of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance. He’s been at it since then, and I’ve long heard of the Nikumaroro hypothesis and my father’s work toward testing it. This year, I finally had the chance to accompany him on a trip to Niku, and we set out on June 21 (you can read more about the expedition here).

Nikumaroro is a very hard place to get it – it’s one of the most remote places on the planet. Getting there involves flying to Fiji and then taking a 5-day boat ride. So I’ve been off the grid for the last few weeks, between getting to and from the island and spending a week digging in the coral and fighting through the jungle brush.

And speaking of pointless, invasive jungle brush (scaviola, if you must know), one of the last things that crossed the transom before I went incommunicado was a New Jersey ethics opinion taking issue with Avvo Legal Services.

While I must commend the authors of the opinion for getting one thing right (finding that Avvo Legal Services doesn’t interfere with the independent professional judgment of participating attorneys), I’ve got a dim view of the rest of it. Like similar opinions before it, it forms a scaviola-like thicket, blocking innovation and consumer access to legal services.

I’ll have more to say about the opinion in an upcoming post – now that I’ve returned to civilization and things other than lost aviators and coconut crabs.

Compelled Speech & Viewpoint Discrimination

Josh King
First Amendment

So “compelled speech.” The government telling you what you’ve got to say. It’s surprisingly common, and also often uncontroversial. Think nutrition labeling and warning signs.

Other times, not so much.

So what’s the test? Under what circumstances can the government tell us what we’ve got to say?

I’ll tell you what the test SHOULD be: it should be the same “intermediate scrutiny” test that applies to commercial speech restrictions. Meaning that if the state wants to make a business say something, that requirement must be both necessary and narrowly-tailored. Oh, and there’s gotta be some evidence of necessity.

But this area of commercial speech law is a mess.

It all starts with Zauderer v. Office of Disciplinary Counsel, a 1985 Supreme Court case dealing with attorney advertising. One of the key issues in the case – and the one it is best known for – was the legality of a disclaimer requirement for “no recovery, no legal fees” advertising.

The Zauderer court found that the disclaimer rule must only be “reasonably related” to the state’s interest in preventing consumer deception. That’s a much lower bar to clear than the intermediate scrutiny standard. Pretty much any argument the state can make without breaking into uncontrollable laughter will do.

Unfortunately, some nuance has gotten lost since Zauderer was decided. What it seems the court meant – though it was only specifically called out by Justice Brennan in his concurrence – is that the “reasonably related” test is only appropriate when the compelled speech is necessary to avoid consumer deception. Sadly, what this has been taken to mean by many lower courts is that ANY compelled speech need only be justified under the “reasonably related” test.

So this brings me to the Supreme Court’s decision Monday in Matel v. Tam, a case involving the trademark application for the band “The Slants.” It was an important decision, and a unanimous one,[ref]8-0; Justice Gorsuch wasn’t on the bench when the case was heard.[/ref] finding that the government’s denying of “disparaging” trademarks was constitutionally impermissible content regulation. But in a four judge concurrence, Justice Kennedy went even further, delving into the importance of holding the government to a high standard when it dictates a viewpoint, even in the commercial speech context:

“Commercial speech is no exception,” the Court has
explained, to the principle that the First Amendment
“requires heightened scrutiny whenever the government
creates a regulation of speech because of disagreement
with the message it conveys.” Sorrell v. IMS Health Inc.,
564 U. S. 552, 566 (2011) (internal quotation marks omitted).
Unlike content based discrimination, discrimination
based on viewpoint, including a regulation that targets
speech for its offensiveness, remains of serious concern in
the commercial context. See Bolger v. Youngs Drug Products
Corp., 463 U. S. 60, 65, 71–72 (1983).

If the government picking and choosing which trademarks are appropriate is “viewpoint discrimination,” why is the same not true for compelled speech? Or, at least, speech that is compelled outside of those situations where disclosure is necessary to cure otherwise-deceptive marketing messages?

This isn’t an idle question. There are dozens of instances of speech compulsion contained within state lawyer advertising rules, and many – if not most- of them aren’t designed to cure otherwise-deceptive messages. In fact, many require that attorneys publish the state’s view on the efficacy or usefulness of lawyer advertising.[ref]For example, New Jersey requires that any comparative advertising by lawyers state that “No aspect of this advertisement has been approved by the Supreme Court of New Jersey.”[/ref]

Speech that’s compelled outside of health, safety, or a need to cure deceptive marketing is an even starker example of viewpoint discrimination than the picking and choosing of acceptable trademarks. I’d love to see the Supreme Court close this “Zauderer exception” to the commercial speech doctrine sooner rather than later.

June 2017 Notes: Big Changes for Lawyer Ad Rules?

Josh King

Are the Bar Ad Rules Finally Changing? One of the little-understood impediments to consumer access to legal services is the way lawyers are regulated. From our monopoly on “the practice of law,” to our antiquated jurisdictional limits and advertising rules, lawyers labor under a regulatory burden with few equals. And while there are some good reasons for “lawyer exceptionalism” – the protection of clients chief among them – too often our over-regulatory impulses get the better of us. But there are signs of hope. The ABA has gotten serious about looking at streamlining the Model Rules on attorney advertising. And, not content to wait, the Virginia State Bar recently adopted changes very similar to those under consideration at the ABA. That’s a very good thing. The legacy ad regs make it harder than it should be for lawyers to inform the public. Here’s hoping that these signs of thaw turn into a torrent of changes to every state’s rules.

 Don’t Sue Over Opinions. There are many sayings about opinions, few of them flattering. We all have opinions, and most of us – if we’re being honest – would admit that we don’t like hearing opinions that we consider wrong. And this can really drive us off the deep end when those opinions are expressed online. Case in point: this real estate lawyer vexed that Zillow’s “zestimate” has made it difficult to sell her home. But what this lawyer (and too many others like her) fails to grasp is that there’s no legal duty to publish “right” opinions. In fact, it’s fine (legally, at least) to publish opinions that are completely, utterly unfounded. This principle offers important protection of the “breathing room” necessary for the fulsome expression of ideas. Keep that in mind the next time someone talks about suing over a hyperbolic online review.

 Blogging Makes You a Better Speaker.  I’ve been blogging for something like 13 years now, but it’s always something I’ve done for myself. I find it makes me more thoughtful – and a better lawyer – when I have to articulate and defend my ideas in written form. Now Kevin O’Keefe points out another benefit of blogging: the positive impact on public speaking performance. This resonated with me, because I’ve certainly experienced it. By having written so much about professional ethics and the First Amendment, I have a huge number of topics I can explore. And even more importantly, the breadth and depth of my writing allows me to improvise and answer questions on these topics quite fluidly. If you’re looking to step up your speaking game, blogging regularly may be just the ticket.

Social Media News and Notes:

More shade thrown at live-tweeting: judges in Bill Cosby case will have none of it.

Hey, someone went and built free plugins to publish your Avvo rating and reviews right on your WordPress website!

Interesting new “Pagefreezer” product captures court-admissible versions of social media evidence.