Unfortunately, it does not appear to be up and online as of yet at The Memphis Bar‘s website, but the latest issue of The Memphis Lawyer is out, and I have a column in it. The column — The Revised RPC 7.3(b)(3): The Road to Constitutional Infirmity is Paved With Good Intentions — talks about a revision to the Tennessee ethics rules that has been in effect since May 1, 2015 and should be of particular relevance to family lawyers. (Regular readers of this blog may recall reading a bit about that development in this earlier post.) My latest column also talks a bit about one of the last U.S. Supreme Court cases from last term — Reed v. Town of Gilbert — that may lay the groundwork for all content-based restrictions on commercial speech (including most restrictions on attorney advertising) having to survive “strict scrutiny” analysis to pass constitutional muster.
Once it is eventually up online, I’ll post an update of some fashion, but if you happen to be a lawyer in Memphis and your issue is sitting in your reading pile … well consider yourself warned.
In the meantime, let me suggest two other things deserving of a read and well worth your time. (And I see in advance the humor of me suggesting that the two items be read as I am confident they both have more readers than I do.)
Karen Rubin has a smart take on something I had no idea existed — prepackaged blog content for lawyers. She gets the ethics analysis quite correct (of course) and avoids explicitly making the kind of snarky statement I would have made: If you are buying prepackaged blog content to pass off as your own to assist with proving yourself to be a “thought leader,” you’re not showing much “thought” and you certainly aren’t “leading.” The one question I still have about the whole scheme is whether Checkpoint Marketing intends to sell the same canned content to multiple lawyers? It’s a business model that works in t.v. ads for lawyers (though admittedly it worked better before YouTube because you were less likely to ever see the same ad concept in the other markets). If multiple lazy bloggers lawyers can each buy the same stuff, it would seem likely to lead to even a greater level of embarrassment when a simple Google search for some particular phrasing in a post would pretty quickly reveal multiple astroturfish posts from different lazy bloggers “authors.”
The second is this New York Times piece on the revelation that the human being who is serving as General Counsel of Al Jazeera America, and who has a quite impressive resume of places of employment before that might not actually have ever been a lawyer at all during the last three decades or so. It’s a fascinating read, and the story has now triggered Al Jazeera America to suspend the gentlemen and pursue an investigation.