While we’re every bit as much lawyers online as off, and the constraints against fraud, impropriety and deception apply to everything we do as lawyers here as well, the fact is that the disciplinary authorities do not roam the internet looking for lawyers in violation.  This leaves us, absent a specific complaint, with a free hand to exercise free speech, both commercial and pure, without fear of censorship or oversight. 

Does that make you happy?  If so, send a thank you note to Eric Turkewitz and Carolyn Elefant. 

The Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers met in Orlando the past couple of days.  It’s an association comprised of lawyers who prosecute, defense and decide attorney disciplinary cases.  One of the presentations was on attorney discipline in the electronic world, a huge and developing area for attorneys to engage in proscribed conduct,   BrianTannebaum, whose practices spans defendant attorneys in disciplinary cases as well as criminal defense, was there to live twit the program.

During the course of otherwise dry information, something familiar caught my eye in a pair of twits:

@ carolynelefant discussions on eshaming is being discussed #aprl

@ turkewitz blogging on the airplane crash is being discussed #aprl

The gravamen of the discussion is that, while disciplinary committees can’t keep pace with the explosive growth of content by lawyers online and, even if they could, wouldn’t be able to deal with it, it’s not a huge problem. The reason is simple.  People like Eric Turkewitz are out there keeping a close watch on lawyers who are behaving unethically. People like Carolyn Elefant are out there making sure that unethical lawyers aren’t getting away with it by e-shaming.  As Tannebaum twitted, the internet, via the vigilance of lawyers, is largely self-regulating.

The internet, and particularly the blawgosphere, could easily become a cesspool of lies and scams by lawyers.  Given the purpose of many lawyers, to convince potential clients that a lawyer with three weeks experience fetching coffee is really a highly experience trial lawyer who has won hundreds of multi-million dollar cases and cares deeply about them immediately after their child was brutally killed in a car crash, it’s hardly a stretch.  Lawyers have shunned ethical considerations in favor of marketers and social media gurus conception of how they should present themselves to the world.  In the toss-up between honor and business, there’s no contest.

This might well have led to the heavy hand of rules made and applied to the internet by those charged with maintaining lawyer discipline.  Chances are slim that they would have fashioned sensible rules, and grim that they would have a viable understanding of what happens in the etherworld.  Chances are extremely good that they would have imposed broad, sweeping regulation that would have undermined almost all speech, substantive or promotional, rather than engage in the very difficult sorting process that would have allowed attorneys to engage in blawging while constraining the deceptive.  We would all be painted with the same brush.

Except, there was no compelling need to do so.  The blawgosphere has not turned into that cesspool, because lawyers like Turk and Carolyn are here, and not afraid to keep a sharp eye on the unethical practices of others, or do something about it.

For all those who implore their brethren to turn a blind eye to their dubious methods, or whine about the public humiliation of being called out for conduct that embarrasses them, that’s the price of avoiding disciplinary death for all lawyers online.  The alternative might well be to just shut all of us down, silence us, for the inability to police our every comment and idea.  Would it really be that bad?  Try “friending” a judge in Florida and find out.

Thank you, Turk and Carolyn.  The freedom for the good online is due to your efforts.  It’s because of your strength and will to find and shame the bad that we have the freedom to express ourselves in the blawgsophere.