Not quite as much fun as naked lawprof mud-wrestling, a grudge match appeared at Brian Tannebaum’s My Law License over the ABA (not the journal, but the actual American Bar Association) initiative to clean up the internet, The ABA has formed a commission (oh dear!) called Ethics 20/20 to study “lawyer developmental tools,” which is the benign way of saying “marketing.” Marketers are “alarmed.”
“There is no agenda,” said commission co-chair and Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr partner Jamie Gorelick. ” The paper is designed to reflect some of the questions that have been posed to us.”
But legal marketing consultant Larry Bodine said the paper is the first step down the wrong path for the ABA, which should be concentrating its ethics effort on lawyers who steal from their clients, not lawyers who use Twitter.
Now Bodine is a curious leader for this bunch of misfits, defrocked lawyers and snake oil salesmen. He’s broken ranks from the crowd from time to time, demonstrating the rarest of marketing qualities, actual thought. Yet this time, he’s decided to take the lead and rally the troops, and the troops are happy to follow.
The ABA is quietly gathering support to choke off lawyer marketing on the Internet by having the ABA Commission on Ethics 2020 Working Group distribute an “Issues Paper Concerning Lawyers’ Use of Internet Based Client Development Tools.”
Please join me in marshalling lawyers to stop this effort by the ABA to burden lawyer marketing on the internet with unneeded ethics obstacles. Lawyer marketing needs less regulation, not more stifling ethics rules.
Free market lawyering. Yippee! The comments that follow, from marketers and their sycophants, show the support.
“State bar regulations are hurting both the public and the legal profession. Anyone at the MyLegal conference heard the visceral reaction to the Virginia regulations. Anyone in Florida who has a website that requires multiple disclaimers before seeing anything beyond the homepage. I could go on,” said Conrad Saam, Senior Marketing Manager for Avvo in Seattle, WA.
“My personal opinion is that the rules insult the intelligence of every human being whom the ABA assumes can’t think for him/herself. The realistic side of me knows it will take centuries for governing bodies like the ABA and state bar associations to see the light and remove or revise the barriers we’ve been fighting for quite a while,” said marketing consultant Nancy Myrland of Indianapolis, IN.
“I get nervous when the ABA starts sticking its nose too deeply into an issue. How many times has the ABA started out saying it just wants to offer “guidance,” only for it to then decide to take on the role of Big Brother. The ABA just can’t get over being a bureaucracy. It loves to regulate and to lay down hard-and-fast rules. It may start down this road with the best of intentions, but who knows where it will end up. Plus, as Staff Counsel, ABA Division for Legal Services, Will Hornsby advises, these new tools don’t need new rules. When lawyers ask me what they need to know about ethics and social media, I give a two-word answer: ‘Common sense,’” said Massachusetts lawyer Bob Ambrogi.
We all get nervous when the ABA sticks its nose into anything, Bob. We also feel compelled to upchuck when we see the product of legal marketing spewed across the internet.
Brian takes on the well-oiled marketing machine, where they show discipline that would shame the Spartan 300, arms locked together, voices chanting we shall oversell in unison.
Oh boy. The ABA wants to clean up the sewer that is online legal marketing. What has the world come to when the American Bar Association, the former pillar of the legal community that is now to social media and social media marketers like a screaming teenager is to a Taylor Swift concert, wants to take a look at the online swill?
I oppose further ABA involvement under one condition: lawyers and marketers stop lying. Lawyers and marketers stop creating images of lawyers that are hurting the public by creating impressions of the lawyer that are deceptive, false, and misleading. The ABA isn’t concerned that lawyers are advertising online – they are concerned that lawyers are lying online.
This is where things get dicey. In the world of legal marketing, there’s no such thing as a lie. They will tell you to their dying breath that their clients are the most wonderful, most caring, most experienced lawyer ever in the whole wide world. No really, they are. Every lawyer who engages the services of a marketer is the bestest lawyer ever. You can tell because their website, blawg, twitter account, LinkedIn, Facebook, whatever, says so. And they would never lie. That would be wrong.
The marketers argue, and correctly, that ethics rules already prohibit lawyers from engaging in deception. What they don’t mention is the problem with addressing the rules, that there are far too many websites and blogs for anyone to inspect for ethical violations, changing constantly, and that even if it was possible for regulators to do so, the claims are soft, subjective and difficult to prove false. Of course, we all know they’re total crap, but knowing and proving are entirely different animals.
This is how marketers make their money, teaching lawyers how to say whatever will bring in the next lead. Been a lawyer for six months? Sure, that’s “highly experienced.” Won a case once? Sure, that’s “one of the most successful lawyers in the state.” Returned a call within two days? Of course that says “deeply concerned and caring.” Oh, come on. What do you expect them to say about their client when there isn’t a single decent claim to be made? Incompetent, greedy, nasty, sleazebags have to make their Mercedes payments too, you know.
Bodine didn’t care much for Brian’s post, and let him have it in a comment.
When you say “Anything that alarms marketers must mean that something having to do with honesty and integrity is getting too close for comfort,” are you referring to the marketers or the lawyers instructing them what to do?
You’ll be sorry when your blog is strapped with ethics rules that govern what you can and can’t say.
“Man up” and stand in favor of lawyer’s free speech on the internet.
~Larry bodine
Free speech, is it? Excellent rallying cry, Larry. We LOVE free speech. We’re all for free speech. But if there’s anybody killing lawyers’ right to free speech, pal, it’s the marketers. Tannebaum replies:
Welcome Larry.
“Man up?” Surely you jest. Perhaps you should take a break from your love affair with some of the worst violators of lawyer ethics on the internet, some of the biggest liars spreading their marketing snake oil and read some of my posts. Or do you not look in to the backgrounds of some of the people you promote?
And let’s not try to convince people that lawyers tell marketers what to do. It’s the other way around. Marketers make money off desperate lawyers who can’t make a buck by helping them “tailor” their biographies to stretch the truth.
And I won’t be sorry when my blog is “strapped” with ethics rules. I’ll look forward to the scrambling marketers and talentless lawyers who will be forced to leave the blogosphere because behind their marketing scheme, is nothing.
It’s a shame that it’s come to this, and worse still that it will fall into the hands of as irrelevant and disconnected an entity as the ABA, which will likely come up with inane rules demonstrating why a camel is a horse designed by committee. But when you create a cesspool of lies and deceit on the internet and then argue that the odor is “success” rather than sewage. this is what happens.
Like Brian says, Larry, marketers started this race to the bottom, and we’re all going to have to deal with it. As for me, I can live without trotting around the boulevard in hot pants (I don’t have the legs for it anyway). Of course, that won’t do your clients any good.
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By quoting only half of what I said, you changed the meaning. I responded to an e-mail thread started by Larry in order to say that he was overstating the implications of the ABA letter and that constructive guidance from the ABA would be welcome. Here is the part of what I said that you left off:
“I see nothing in this document that differs from what I hear everytime I speak to a group of lawyers about social media. Ethics is the number one issue on lawyers’ minds. If constructive guidance can be offered, all the better. … I do not read the document, on its face, as an attempt to “regulate” lawyers’ activity in the Internet. Plus, constructive guidance on these issues would be beneficial to consumers and help protect them against the less scrupulous among us.”
I then went on to say what’s quoted above. I do not think we need new rules, but guidance in helping to apply existing rules to these new tools.
Now I see that it was Larry who left off the first part of my quote, not you Scott. He pulled that out of an e-mail I wrote to support another marketer who said she supported the ABA’s intervention in this.
Nice of you to notice. I had just completed an explanation to that affect and look forward to your correcting Larry for changing the meaning of your quote.
Bad, Larry. Bad.
From now on, I’ll read Larry’s blog before yours.
That will make Larry very happy.
My concern is that the members of the working group apparently have no experience at all in “Internet-based client development tools.” How, then, will they even identify the problems, much less come up with appropriate and workable solutions?
I’ll bet anyone on here $1 that the end result are some bland, “common sense” guidelines that change nothing at all about the practice of “Internet-based client development tools.” They’ll recommend that lawyers not “friend” jurors in the middle of a trial, something that anyone with a lick of sense would already know.
I think you’re right about the problem, with the usual suspects comprising the ABA’s commission. But I suspect that their solution will be either more draconian or needlessly complicated. Notice the absence of anyone on the committee who has a clue about the internet? Of course, if they did put someone on the committee who was knowledgeable, it would likely be someone like David Lat, whose idea of quiet elegance is naked 2L from a TTT law school.
Even if there was such a thing as common sense, we’re well beyond that point in the marketing race to the bottom. The better question to me is whether those for whom ethics is meaningless will comply no matter what they come up with, or whether it will just be us Pollyannas while the marketers continue to sell their snake oil.
I don’t understand the need for an ad hominem attack: “Now Bodine is a curious leader for this bunch of misfits, defrocked lawyers and snake oil salesmen.”
The point is that the Supreme Court allowed lawyers to advertise 33 years ago, and the ABA is still looking for ways to undermine the decision.
You get an A+ for snarkiness and for omitting the quotes of lawyers who oppose more ethics burdens on online marketing. For that, visit
Thank you very much for publicizing my effort to rally people to oppose the ABA effort.
First, you’re welcome. Second, the link is in my post already (which is why I leave it in your comment). Third. Thank you and finally. there’s no ad hominem attack. Now if I said “that poopy-head, Larry Bodine, is a curious leader for this bunch of . . . “
But for boring everyone, I would have included every quote posible from your post. You have no idea how ridiculous they sound to those whose eyes don’t see the world through marketing glasses. I figured three was all anyone need be subjected to, and as Bob notes, you screwed his up.
Always a pleasure to have you stop by and authentically engage in genuine discussion.
The supposedly offending sentence might be ad hominem-ish if it read “Bodine is an obvious leader for this group of [BS artists]” becuase that would imply his ultimate BS-y-ness.
But it says the opposite.
I assume that “free speech” means more spam — including more lawyer-spam on my blog posts criticizing lawyer-spam.
It’s a win-win for the marketing “experts”. Even if they don’t convince the ABA, they’ve totally positioned themselves as heroes to the sort of folks who sell erectile dysfunction meds and pr0n for a living.
I wish that intelligent people would stop referring to every perceived personal attack as an “ad hominem attack.” I know you do it because you want to sound more erudite, but it has the opposite effect.
A personal attack is a personal attack. An ad hominem, short for argumentum ad hominem is not; instead, it is an attempt to disprove a premise by showing some personal trait of the person stating the premise.
For example, “Scott is ugly” is a mere personal attack; “Scott is ugly, and therefore he’s wrong when he says that marketers started this race to the bottom” is an ad hominem. Scott’s appearance doesn’t make his premise false, so it’s a fallacious argument.
For a more comprehensive list of examples, please see http://plover.net/~bonds/adhominem.html.
I’m not that ugly.
Not how ugly? Not so ugly as to be wrong about who started the race? 😉
Thanks, anyway, to Mark. I get tired of explaining to people (other than Scott) that when I call them “ugly” it’s just because they are; not because I’m an ad hominem kinda guy.