FINALLY – a federal court has ruled on a particular bugaboo of mine: the completely-asinine restriction that many states have on lawyers using the verboten terms “expertise” and “specialty.”
In finding that’s Florida’s rule violates the First Amendment, Federal District Court Robert Hinkle noted:
It should be noted, too, that the Bar’s approach is unlikely to solve the problem it posits. The Bar readily allows a lawyer to assert that the lawyer handles only cases of a specific kind. So a lawyer can say personal-injury cases are all the lawyer handles, or that personal-injury cases are the lawyer’s business. The Bar apparently believes that a potential client will attribute a different meaning to these assertions than to the assertion that a lawyer specializes or has expertise in personal-injury cases. But the Bar has offered no empirical or even anecdotal support for the supposition. When First Amendment rights are at stake, such an unsupported (and indeed unintuitive) supposition will not do.
Bravo. And big kudos to the attorneys at Searcy Denney Scarola Barnhart & Shipley for taking this one on. While it’s understandable that not every attorney wants to be the test case for the constitutionality of their state’s ad rules, it’s great to see a law firm stand up for the rights of lawyers and the public alike.
I had no idea there were still bans on this. I regularly see my fellow attorneys claiming they are “specialists” and “experts.”
[…] District of Florida has just issued an opinion striking down one of the Florida Bar’s more clumsy and overbroad advertising rules. The rule in question was […]