The Business of Law – Marketing and Business for Enterprising Attorneys

Sometimes you’ve got to read past the headlines.A recent example is the case in Federal Court in Louisiana having to do with legal advertising. Here’s the issue in a nutshell as reported by Forbes: essentially, the Louisiana Attorney Disciplinary Board got the Louisiana Supreme Court to adopt new rules governing attorney advertisements.

The new rules would take affect on Oct 1, and would place various limits on advertising including the use of mottos, celebrity endorsements, re-enactments and client testimonials. The rules also would have required online ads to be pre-approved to be sure they were not misleading.

A group of attorneys sued claiming that the rules were unconstitutional and violated their freedom of expression.

How did the court rule? That depends on which headline you read:

Judge Upholds Limits on Lawyers Ads blared the Associated Press story on August 3^rd.

While Wendy Davis over at the Daily Online Examiner Blog wrote:Onerous Regs for Web Ads Ruled Unconstitutional.

So you might ask: Who won the case?

Well, given the importance of internet advertising for our business and the fact that Sokolove is the leader in national advertising rules and compliance, I thought I’d devote a blog post to providing a little clarity.

By the way, you can read Judge Feldman’s entire 39 page ruling here.

Basically, the judge upheld some of the rules such as those that prohibited ads that promise results, portray a judge or jury or contain a celebrity endorsement. These are basically the same rules that have applied in a lot of states with respect to television advertisements.

But what was interesting about Feldman’s ruling is the fact that he distinguished internet advertising from television and other forms of advertising and he expressed concern that the state had simply adopted the same rules for internet advertising as for TV and radio.

Specifically Feldman wrote:

“…the State through its high court simply applied the same rules as those developed for television, radio and print ads to Internet advertising. This Court is persuaded that Internet advertising differs significantly from advertising in traditional media.”

Bravo, Judge Feldman!

If Louisiana had their way, lawyers who wanted to run pay per click ads would have had to submit them in advance for disclosure purposes, each different ad, even if very similar would have had to be submitted individually, the filing fees alone would be huge. In fact, one of the plaintiffs in the case, noted (and Feldman included these numbers in his ruling) that a pay per click ad campaign that previously cost $160 would, under the new rules have to add $2100 in filing fees.

Feldman ruled that such a process was not sufficiently “narrowly tailored” to pass Constitutional muster writing: “The Internet presents unique issues related to advertising which the State simply failed to consider.”