APRL’s supplemental advertising overhaul proposal

Back in June 2015, I dedicated a post here to praising APRL’s proposal to streamline ethics rules imposing outdated restrictions on lawyer advertising.  A proposal that recognizes that lots of states currently have advertising restrictions on the books that could not survive a constitutional challenge and that aren’t really even being sought to be enforced and that seeks to have the ABA revise Model Rules 7.1, 7.4, and 7.5 and replace them instead with a revised Model Rule 7.1.

At that time, the APRL proposal was limited to a focus on trying to overhaul the provisions that address general advertising in public media.  APRL has now issued a supplemental report that turns its attention to the over regulation of restrictions on solicitation, including targeted written communications directed at potential clients.

The entire proposal is worth reading, and you can download it from here, but these are the highlights:

Much like the prior proposal, the APRL supplemental report proposes to collapse a number of provisions in the ABA Model Rule down to one revised rule, Model Rule 7.2 which would replace the provisions in current Model Rule 7.2 and Model Rule 7.3.  The two most significant aspects of the proposal are: (1) a revised focus on what kind of communications should be treated as prohibited solicitations; and (2) two new exceptions to even those prohibited solicitations.

Rather than continue with a framework that treats “real-time electronic contacts” as an equivalent of an in-person solicitation and, therefore, prohibited generally, APRL suggests that the prohibition should really only apply in-person, live-telephone, and things that are the digital equivalent of face-to-face encounters and not things that are the digital equivalent of targeted mailings.

The two new exceptions are if the person being solicited is a sophisticated user of legal services or if the communication is one authorized by a court order requiring notification in a class action.  The second exception was already written into a portion of the comment to RPC 7.3 in the Model Rule and is just being proposed to be moved up to the black letter of the rule and fleshed out further.  The first exception is brand new but consistent with an understanding of the motivation behind the prohibitions on solicitation in the first place — a concern that the imbalance between a person trained in persuading others and a regular person facing a pending legal need could lead to overreaching on the part of the lawyer and decision stemming from coercion on the part of the regular person.  For someone who qualifies as a “sophisticated user of legal services,” which the proposal defines in a comment to be “an individual who has had significant dealings with the legal profession or who regularly retains legal services for business purposes.”  And, yet, acknowledging that as the “evil” to be prohibited, the fact that the Model Rules already, and the APRL revised proposal as well, still actually prohibits any and all solicitations that actually involve coercion, duress, or harassment  even if the targets would other be excepted.

One other aspect of the proposal worth noting is its more realistic and detailed approach to explicitly permitting online group advertising.

If I had one criticism of the APRL proposal, it is with the way it defines a sophisticated user of legal services.  The second part about regular retention of legal services for business purposes is likely where it should have stopped, as the first portion of the definition is pretty amorphous and subject to manipulation.  For example, would a recidivist offender who has gone through repeated jury trials and spent many years in prison someone who would qualify as having had significant dealings with the legal profession?  Seems like a pretty clear argument could be made that the answer would be yes.

As with the first APRL proposal, I have no real sense of how likely it will be that the ABA will take it up and accomplish the implementation of these common sense proposals.  And, even if that happens, then the actual impact on the profession will only come about if states undertake to adopt this kind of streamlined, common sense approach to these issues.

Unfortunately, after years of appearing to move in the right direction on the issues of lawyer advertising, the path my state has taken recently has been in the opposite direction.  Our court actually, most recently, took action to expand the 30-day off limits provision that the APRL report indicates has not been widely adopted to go beyond personal injury matters into divorce filings.