Another vexing topic for the marketing folks at last week’s “Law Firm Marketing Strategies” conference was the wildly different and sometimes numbingly specific attorney advertising rules between states.

Advertising (or “commercial speech”) is protected by the 1st Amendment unless it is false or misleading. Inside that “false and misleading” lies the panopoly of attorney advertising regulation, running the gamut from the sensible (no guaranteeing a particular outsome) to the bizarre (no ambient noise in attorney TV spots unless it is classical music).

Besides the impact on interstate practice, the more specific state rules can be troublesome even for attorneys with a local practice, as the rules are tweaked often and don’t possess the flexibility to keep up with rapidly evolving methods of marketing.

At the end of the day, much of the regulation in this area seems to be a matter of trying to fit “taste” regulation into the narrower confines of false and misleading advertising. It’s a nice sentiment to try and preserve the dignity of the profession. However, it’s unconstitutional when overreaching, and probably pointless to boot: Tastes and standards change, and you can no more mandate a return to wearing dresses and fedoras than you can draw a box around what society finds acceptable in advertising messages.

Of course, communities can be remarkably self-policing if they think the envelope has been pushed too far. In the case of the Chicago billboard depicted above, community outrage - not bar regulation or enforcement - led to the billboard being pulled after less than a week.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 16th, 2007 at 11:15 am by Josh King, VP of Business Development and General Counsel and is filed under Marketing for Lawyers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.