And thankfully, it was PI lawyers, not criminal defense lawyers.  Kevin O’Keefe, an advocate of lawyers using blawgs to market their existence, at  Real Lawyers Have Blawgs has a vested interest in keeping the blawgosphere clean.  While we may quibble over whether promotional blawging impairs the purpose and credibility of the blawgosphere, at least we share the belief that it should never deliberately violate ethical precepts and prove to the world that attorneys are, indeed, the lowest form of scum.

But  Kevin found a personal injury lawyer’s blawg that went too far. 

Ran across this personal injury blog post in my RSS feeds tonight. Posted by Attorney Ryan Bradley of St. Louis.

The title of the post was:

[Name of injury victim] Sustains Personal Injury In Car Wreck on I-70 Near Earth City Expressway in St. Louis County; St. Louis Missouri Personal Injury Law Firm Gives Free Legal Advice to Car Accident Victims :: Missouri Accident Lawyer Blog

The post goes on to directly solicit the victim or his family to call the law firm for legal advice.  Hi-tech ambulance chasing, with the victim’s name used and the implication is that he either does, or seeks to, represent the victim.

Turkewitz spells it out this way:

Thus, he goes beyond the mere advertising, and into outright solicitation of an individual. Even if he is ethically secure on First Amendment grounds, what the has done certainly appears scummy and is a close cousin to sending a solicitation in the mail to the house. Or picking up the phone and calling. Or sending a person to the house. Or the hospital. You know where I’m gong with this. Solicitation is but one step removed from actual ambulance chasing.

One step removed might be generous in the digital age when physical presence behind the ambulance isn’t necessary.  This feeds into every negative stereotype of lawyers, with the only difference being the adaptation of the internet as the delivery mechanism.

Then Kevin, ever the crusader for safe marketing, found another :

Seattle plaintiff’s lawyer Mike Meyers writes about accidents naming seriously injured people he does not represent ‘with the intent of reaching accident victims or the people who care about them.’

…I want them–or someone who cares about them–to call our office and get the help they deserve rather than being manipulated by a well trained adjuster to settle their claim short of full value. It’s as simple as that.

Lets turn this sucker to the side and see how it would work for criminal defense lawyers.  Assume some fictional defendant gets busted.  We can call her “Bartha Stewart.”  She’s loaded, and representing her would be akin to being born a trust-fund baby.  Some blawging lawyer, who we’ll call named “Mob Rovillo,” sees the headline over his morning cup’o’joe, and says, “I want that case.”

Ten minutes later, the headline to the post on his blawg, I’m The Best White Collar Defender EVER!, reads:

Bartha Stewart Busted.  Rovillo Is The ONLY Lawyer Who Can Beat the Rap!  Call Me Now, Bartha!

Now let’s assume this isn’t a parody, but he’s serious.  The body of the post goes on to state that he’s the only competent lawyer for this case, and the rest are lying, cheating, incompetent scuzzbuckets.  Okay, this example may be laughable because of its ineffectiveness, but the point remains that it has the potential to prove to our many detractors that criminal defense lawyers are indeed scum.

More importantly, I can see something along these lines being one possible future for the blawgosphere.  Let’s face it, there are many lawyers starting blawgs with the hope that they will prove the marketing panacea of the future.  It’s a small step for them to go the “direct solicitation” route.  But if they do, and if no one calls them on it, these efforts will turn the blawgosphere into proof that lawyer haters, in general, and criminal defense lawyer haters, in particular, need to show that we are the evil people they believe us to be.

Kudos to Kevin and Turk for finding these miscreants and calling them what they are.  And thank God it was the PI sluts, and not some criminal defense lawyer, who decided to take the first leap into the gutter.