Social Media + The Regulation of Professional Speech
Watching with interest: whether the Supreme Court grants cert in Capital Associated Industries v. Stein, a 4th Circuit decision out of North Carolina addressing the interplay between legal licensing and the First Amendment. While the Stein decision ultimately decides that regulation of the unlicensed practice of law is subject to intermediate scrutiny – and that… Continue reading Will SCOTUS Address Professional Speech?
More than 30% of Americans now work in professions requiring licenses, and we seem to have become inured to the condition of seeking permission from the state before being permitted to perform our professions. Fill out the form, pay the fee, smile for the camera. Rinse and repeat annually. So it’s not necessarily obvious that… Continue reading Licensing Restrictions
So: we know that the First Amendment largely proscribes content-based speech regulation. Outside of a handful of specific categories, and absent surviving strict scrutiny review, the government cannot regulate the content of speech. We also know that regulation of one of these categories of speech – commercial speech – is subject to a lesser standard… Continue reading The Professional Speech Doctrine
The “DoNotPay” app, originally launched to script people through the process of fighting traffic tickets, has vastly expanded its scope to include some 15 different areas. DNP founder Joshua Browder has a thread on twitter running down the changes: Big news! You can now sue anyone (in all 50 U.S states and 3,000 counties), fight… Continue reading “DoNotPay” App Expands; Attorneys Tremble
In early April, I left Avvo. It’s been 10 years; it’s time for something new. What that is yet . . . I don’t know. Summer is glorious in the Pacific Northwest; I’d love to take some serious time off and enjoy it with my family and friends. So I don’t know how much more… Continue reading 5 Wishes For Attorney Regulation Reform
So a couple of weeks ago I was at the ABA’s Third Annual UPL School in Chicago – a gathering of those bar authorities dedicated to rooting out the unauthorized practice of law. And I have to say – it was a strangely chastened bunch. The specter of North Carolina Dental Board v. FTC hung… Continue reading Ethics Opinions and Antitrust
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.… Continue reading North Carolina Defeats First Amendment Defense to UPL
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… Continue reading Why New Jersey Gets it Wrong on Avvo Legal Services
It’s not too early into the Trump administration to call it: this is a group that’s got very little regard for the truth. And that’s even by the low standards of political spin – we’ve got plenty of examples, already, of out-and-out gaslighting. Chief among the lying liars in the administration has been White House… Continue reading Disbar Conway for Lying?
Brian Faughnan has the details, but here’s the quick overview: A Colorado attorney agrees to help out his in-laws, who are dealing with a debt collector in their home state of Minnesota. Like a good son-in-law, he does it for free. He engages in a series of emails with the attorney for the creditor, who eventually… Continue reading Minnesota’s No Good, Very Bad UPL Decision