So, the experience of the last year of pandemic life has messed with a lot of people’s ability to remember when certain things happened. For some people, remembering events of the last year are not the problem as much as remembering when certain things happened in the before times. For others, short term memory of events has been impacted a bit in a way that is more akin to briefly failing to grasp what day of the week it is when everything seems like the same day.
The nostalgia-based wave of reboots/updates/re-releases of older content isn’t exactly helping with the feeling of temporal displacement. A Frasier reboot is apparently now in the works. Saved by the Bell has been relaunched and out there on streaming services for months now. A new version of Walker Texas Ranger has given one of the actors from Supernatural something to do. Punky Brewster is apparently back but now my age, and indications are that Dexter and even The Fresh Prince of Bel Air are going to be freshened up and back on our television screens.
So, for someone who already refuses to believe that the 90s were 30 years ago, bringing back all of the 90s entertainment can make for further confusion.
A quick look this week at legal news didn’t exactly help with temporal awareness:
Seriously, are we doing this again too? My immediate recollection was that Florida went after a lawyer for a similar ad in the 90s, but the article confirms that the decision that came down and was subject to discussion was actually in 2005.
Florida’s prior effort to punish a lawyer for colorful advertising was wrong then, and, if it actually leads to some form of discipline in 2021, it would be even more wrong now.
The Florida opinion referenced in the article which imposed discipline on an attorney named (of all the 90s things) Chandler didn’t turn on the idea that using an image of a pit bull in an advertisement or trying to self-proclaim a pit bull as a moniker was misleading, but instead scolded on the basis of the idea that the pit bull references in marketing was not the kind of speech that would help consumers make an informed decision about how to choose a lawyer.
One would have hoped in the intervening 15 or so years that regulators in our profession have had plenty of time to recognize that the commercial speech of lawyers in marketing their services shouldn’t be regulated on the basis of taste or regulators’ subjective views on what is or isn’t appropriate but instead should only be pursued if the communications are actually false and misleading to the consumer.
Kudos to my APRL colleague Brian Tannebaum for trying to be the voice of reason in the above-referenced ABA Journal online article.
Also though, given the passage of time and the fact that there is much more to the story of pit bulls in the nature versus nurture realm and whether they have been unfairly given a reputation for being a certain type of animal, how about lawyers do a bit better in also recognizing what decade this is? I too wouldn’t ever choose that approach to advertising, but, at this point, why not explore the Cerberus instead of a pit bull?