This development in South Carolina happened last month and I saw some folks getting a little worked up about it but am only getting around to writing a little about it now. (In fairness, last month only became last month around 80 hours or so ago.) But for some people getting worked up about it, it wouldn’t actually be all that noteworthy given that all South Carolina did was adopt a comment that made plain what the rule already truly required.
Nevertheless, it makes for an interesting subject not only because of the reaction it garnered but how it came about… in response to a petition seeking to change South Carolina’s Rule 1.6 in an entirely different direction.
But, I’ve managed to get way ahead of myself with the textual throat-clearing and have started in on all of this like you know what I am talking about.
In June 2019, the South Carolina Supreme Court entered an order that rejected an attempt by the South Carolina Bar to seek to have RPC 1.6 revised to permit lawyers to make reference to published court decisions in their advertising without having to get their client’s informed consent. And, to be clear, what the bar was asking for was a very incremental level of permission. They were seeking to have the rule allow a lawyer to make reference to the citation of a published case, not the details of it, just the citation.
Now I suspect many lawyers would assume that no such revision was even necessary on the basis that they simply think that public information is public information and can be used in whatever fashion is desired. In fact, this Bloomberg article quotes someone from a law firm I used to work for saying something along those lines. That might well be a common sense approach but it is simply an entirely incorrect statement when it comes to how the ethics rule on confidentiality works.
As I’ve written about in the past (probably more times than you care to remember but most recently in August 2018), RPC 1.6 continues to impose confidentiality obligations on lawyers as to information related to representation of a client even as to the most public of events. And, what that means is, when you work through the rule and its various provisions authorizing disclosure of such information . . . there simply isn’t a provision that justifies use of the information in commercial advertising endeavors without the consent of the client.
The South Carolina Supreme Court was not interested in what the Bar was seeking. Instead, it opted to adopt a new comment to RPC 1.6 to drive the point home about what the text of RPC 1.6 already requires.
Specifically, the Court added the following new Comment [7] to its RPC 1.6:
[7] Disclosure of information related to the representation of a client for the purpose of marketing or advertising the lawyer’s services is not impliedly authorized because the disclosure is being made to promote the lawyer or law firm rather than to carry out the representation of a client. Although other Rules govern whether and how lawyers may communicate the availability of their services, paragraph (a) requires that a lawyer obtain informed consent from a current or former client if an advertisement reveals information relating to the representation. This restriction applies regardless of whether the information is contained in court filings or has become generally known. See Comment [3]. It is important the client understand any material risks related to the lawyer revealing information when the lawyer seeks informed consent in accordance with Rule 1.0(g). A number of factors may affect a client’s decision to provide informed consent, including the client’s level of sophistication, the content of any lawyer advertisement and the timing of the request. General, open-ended consent is not sufficient.
Of course, the South Carolina Supreme Court is not wrong about this. And, at a practical level, requiring client consent is not truly that onerous.
However, given the connection to lawyer advertising generally that this development has, it is worth pointing out that South Carolina is still a generally bad jurisdiction when it comes to that topic. Partly, this is because it still refuses to recognize at a fundamental level what the purpose of advertising actually is by having this kind of requirement in its RPC 7.2(a):
All advertisements shall be predominately informational such that, in both quantity and quality, the communication of factual information rationally related to the need for and selection of a lawyer predominates and the communication includes only a minimal amount of content designed to attract attention to and create interest in the communication.