Ethics From ABA TechShow

It’s all about permission.  Technology brings lawyers a wealth of opportunity, and lawyers want permission to enjoy this opportunity.  Enter the ABA.  Over the past few days, ABA TechShow has brought lawyers without practices together to learn how they could teach others to be successful.  Seems ironic, but only in the world of practicing lawyers.  In the world of technolawyers, it makes perfect sense.

There’s the keynote speaker, Ari Kaplan.  Formerly an associate with McDermott Will & Emery, now a legal consultant, Kaplan wowed the crowd with the assertion that self-promotion isn’t about promoting yourself. 


“People think self-promotion is about yourself,” Kaplan told the Tribune. “It has nothing to do with promoting yourself. It’s about promoting others and let that speak for your character. That’s my philosophy.”

While it’s a better idea than the typical screaming “hire me” type stuff that most prefer, it’s still about giving lawyers permission to shill.  Worse, perhaps, is that it’s suggesting a bit of a scam, given that it’s all about disingenuous promotion, being nice to you so that you will be nice to me, even though I couldn’t care less about you and only care about what it does for me. 

But this is the ABA TechShow, right?  If the ABA says this is the way lawyers should be, who am I to argue?

Then there’s the ABA’s marketing ethics panel, made up of “Will Hornsby, staff counsel for the ABA Standing Committee on the Delivery of Legal Services, and Matt Homann, founder of LexThink, an “innovation consultancy” for lawyers, [who] have the expertise on technology-based legal marketing.”  Do they?  Or are they both of the pro-marketing ilk, their presentation about pushing the marketing envelope to the edge of the ethical precipice, before it falls into the abyss.


“These are just guesses here,” Homann warned the audience at the start of the program, “because no one really knows what’s going on with all of this stuff.”

The problem isn’t really that the law is terribly unclear.  It isn’t.  But the problem is that the edge of ethics has yet to be determined, and the ABA’s presentation is all about lawyers pushing it to the edge.  If it wasn’t, I note orthogonally, they would have had Brian Tannebaum or Mark Bennett on the panel.  Instead, they had “legal consultants” explaining the “rules”.



Sometimes those rules don’t fit well with technology-based business models that may be deemed impermissible referral services or permissible forms of group advertising, Hornsby added. Payment methods may challenge the notions of permissible flat fee payments or impermissible fee splits. Templates used by some social networking vehicles may violate specific terms prohibited under the rules, such as calling oneself an expert.

There are now computer programs lawyers can use that will scan the Internet for blog postings mentioning a particular subject, such as motorcycle accidents, leave a sympathetic comment on the blogger’s site and invite readers to click on that comment for more information, which takes the user to the lawyer’s own website, Hornsby said.

And now the ABA has put its imprimatur on such marvels. Woo hoo!  The old school view was, when in doubt, it’s unethical.  The new sees it differently.  Until you’re caught, go for it.  If it makes you a buck, it’s your right to do it. No longer is it a problem if your intended marketing scheme doesn’t comport with the rules; where before it was unethical, not it’s just a poor “fit”.  The problem isn’t you, but rules that haven’t kept pace with technology.  If there was any doubt before, it’s now gone.  You have the ABA’s permission. 

The love of “innovation” has become an end in itself to many.  They so love anything “e” that the only question is how best to use it, not whether to use it.  They see only the upside but not the down.  What’s wrong with that?  The focus is not on how tech can reduce our costs so that we can lower our fees and make access to excellent legal representation more accessible to the public.  It’s not on how we can improve our research so we can deliver better representation to clients. Nope. The focus is on how we can make ourselves look more attractive in hotpants.  And that’s the ABA TechShow.  Hope you didn’t miss it.

3 thoughts on “Ethics From ABA TechShow

  1. Mark Bennett

    There are now computer programs lawyers can use that will scan the Internet for blog postings mentioning a particular subject, such as motorcycle accidents, leave a sympathetic comment on the blogger’s site and invite readers to click on that comment for more information, which takes the user to the lawyer’s own website, Hornsby said.

    It’s outrageous that he would say this without saying, “. . . and you’re an idiot if you use such a program.”

    Where did you find this account?

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