Categories
. Legal ethics

I always knew I’d be headlining music festivals one day.

That’s not true at all. I never even imagined I’d be the headliner at a music festival.

After this year’s AmericanaFest in Nashville though, everything has changed.

Well, that’s actually still pretty misleading as I was not the headliner at AmericanaFest.

I did, however, get to be a speaker during AmericanaFest, as part of a panel along with Professor Tim Chinaris. Ours was neither the most high-profile and well-attended session of the conference, but we did talk for 90 minutes about a timely topic in the world of legal ethics.

Unlike loads of other parts of this post, the two-immediately preceding sentences are neither false nor misleading.

Other programming events at the CLE conference portion of AmericanaFest included a session (featuring the daughter of June Carter Cash as a panelist) focused on the upcoming PBS series from Ken Burns about the history of country music, a lunch session involving a conversation with Grammy award winner Brandi Carlile, and a session focused on combating internet monopolies featuring another Grammy award winner, T-Bone Burnett.

Professor Chinaris and I spoke about the new ABA Model Rules revisions addressing lawyer advertising and the current trend toward modernization of such rules across the country. Ours was definitely the best presentation during AmericanaFest on that subject.

Of course, to make that last sentence entirely truthful and not the least bit misleading, I should add that ours was the only presentation during AmericanaFest on that subject.

This post has been much more amusing for me to write than it probably has been for you to read. But, to the extent it can end up being a constructive effort at making any coherent point relevant to legal ethics, that point would be this: if a lawyer were seriously (rather than in jest) making any of the various kinds of false or misleading statements written above in order to advertise their services, the only ethics rule that would be necessary to have a way of imposing discipline for such conduct would be a rule such as ABA Model Rule 7.1.

Model Rule 7.1: Communications Concerning A Lawyer’s Services.

A lawyer shall not make a false or misleading communication about the lawyer or the lawyer’s services. A communication is false or misleading if it contains a material misrepresentation of fact or law, or omits a fact necessary to make the statement considered as a whole not materially misleading.

If this post can be allowed to make one other coherent point relevant to legal ethics, it would do so by quoting a piece of the report and recommendations from the Utah Work Group on Regulatory Reform that (as mentioned in this earlier post) the Utah Supreme Court approved explaining the need to rework Utah’s ethics rules related to lawyer advertising:

The main concern should be the protection of the public from false, misleading, or overreaching solicitations and advertising. Any other regulation of lawyer advertising seems to serve no legitimate purposes; indeed, it is blunt, ex ante, and — like so many current regulations — neither outcomes-based nor risk-appropriate.