Categories
. Legal ethics

I give you sprinkles today in hopes you will help me make it rain tomorrow?

About three months ago, I wrote about a New York ethics opinion that blessed a marketing effort that I stressed would likely be unethical in Tennessee.  That situation involved a lawyer giving client’s a rebate if they agreed to post a review of the lawyer’s work at an online site. In a fairly decent sign […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

APRL Advertising Revision Proposal and the NOBC Meeting

I had the opportunity last Friday to attend the joint APRL/NOBC program put on during the National Organization of Bar Counsel meeting in Chicago (which also happens at the same time as APRL’s annual meeting, which happens to run at the same time as the ABA Annual Meeting).  The joint program focused on APRL’s white […]

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. Legal ethics

Hopefully this will be the first step in streamlining the regulation of lawyer advertising

I commend to your reading a very well done, thorough, and I think (hope) persuasive report from the Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers regarding the subject of lawyer advertising.  Although none of us were on the Lawyer Advertising Committee that put this together, several of us on the committee are members of APRL.   You can […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

More attorney adventures with Avvo and a reminder about The Streisand Effect

During my teleseminar presentation for the Clear Law Institute, I talked at some length about a situation dating back to January 2014 when a Chicago lawyer ended up agreeing to discipline over how she responded to a former client’s negative review of her on the Avvo service.  You can read a bit about that story here, but […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

When is a phone not a phone?

In a world where people use their smart phones for seemingly everything, including actually talking to other people on the phone from time-to-time, an interesting ethics issue has been percolating in the world of attorney advertising.  Namely, for purposes of the ethics rules that exist to restrict how lawyers can go out about actively soliciting […]

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. Legal ethics

NY lawyers can give clients a rebate for an Avvo rating, but Tennessee lawyers shouldn’t get excited.

For an ethics nerd who also gets to focus on something they enjoy thinking about as part of their practice, I find the proliferation of lawyer rating services to be fascinating, less for the actual availability of ratings, but more for the ancillary questions they lead people to ask. One that I’ve seen discussed recently […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Why blog posts aren’t, and shouldn’t try to be, solicitations of clients.

So this little blogpost from a Michigan bankruptcy attorney that went viral would be a perfect example to use to answer a question I get asked quite frequently:  When do I have to worry about something I post online being treated as a solicitation of a client under the ethics rules?  It would be a […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Social media and advertising issues

Another bar association has recently issued an ethics opinion  over whether/how lawyers can make use of particular types of social media, whether such use constitutes advertising, and related issues.  The particular ethics opinion in question was issued March 10, 2015 by the New York County Lawyers Association and deals with LinkedIn. Many of the questions addressed […]

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. Legal ethics

More potential advertising issues (of a sort) on the horizon

As something of a follow-up post about the expansion of the existing 30-day prohibition on certain solicitation efforts that the Tennessee Supreme Court has now ordered, it likely is worth noting that the existing 30-day restriction in the ethics rules tied to just disasters and personal injury matters has always itself been somewhat controversial among […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Two ethics rule revisions on the way … one good, one not-so-much

After putting proposals out for public comment in 2014, the Tennessee Supreme Court in the span of a week in February 2015 ordered changes to Tennessee’s lawyer ethics rules that will each take effect on May 1, 2015.  For those lawyers who favor a robust view of lawyer speech rights, the two orders present a […]