Slashdot Mirror
New York Bar May Crack Down on Blogging Lawyers
An anonymous reader writes "While you might not guess it from watching late night TV, advertisements by lawyers are regulated by a web of regulations intended to protect potential clients from deceptive claims in such ads. Generally, these rules require lawyers to submit their ads to a review board, often with a filing fee paid with each new advertisement. The New York bar has proposed new rules which would define blogging as advertising. Should these rules be enacted, any New York lawyer who blogs on any legal topic in New York would be required to submit any new blog post to the New York Bar for review. For New York lawyers who write frequently updated blogs, this could force them to make multiple (and potentially expensive) reports to the New York Bar every single day."
Interesting in that it points out a class of morons. But does anyone really think this will happen, given the consequences?
Or they could just stop blogging and do the job i'm paying them $100/hr to do.
Badass Resumes
one must also take into account this as well http://www.easy-poll.com/sonda.vote.2.6979/
Yeah, I'm tired of searching out Lawyer's blogs to see who has the most annoying 1-800-ASK-____ phone number because late night TV doesn't show me enough of them.
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
Hardly.
SO IDC.
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/ is one that could be affected as its based out of NY, and is defentlay one that a lot of people pay attention to. This seams a little over the top to be honest
I wonder if slashdot interviews would count?
Don't be absurd. It won't force them to report more, it will force them not to update their web logs, which is, no doubt, the real point.
I suppose lawyers it's to ensure that lawyers can't make extravagant claims in their advertising. .. and they end up in jail .. not like they can do anything.
.. including their cousin Vinny?
After all if you tell someone you're going to get them off on their charges
Why do many (most?) states require you to be a member of a bar association to defend someone in court anyway. If the defendent is willing to take the risk why not let them choose anyone
Money Grubbing Lawyers?
"Generally, these rules require lawyers to submit their ads to a review board, often with a filing fee paid with each new advertisement."
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Honestly, who cares? It's not like the government is doing this, it's a "voluntary" organization maintained by a group of lawyers. This has zero effect on anyone except lawyers and probably won't go through anyway, because there are plenty of lawyers who are capable of showing how blogging isn't advertisement.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
...is certainly akin to advertising, but some is more akin to writing op-ed pieces for a newspaper and doing commentary in other media, or just writing a book (but that it is published incrementally.)
Seems to me it makes more sense to regulate based on the content than the medium, in this case, but then, I'm not a member of the NY Bar.
There are an insane number of lawyers in New York. If 1% of them sent in a blog post check request every day for a week you probably wouldn't be able to stand in the bar associations hall and USPS would be profitable again. They might even be able to put some of those blue mailboxes back on the streets again.
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
I read the articles and was left wondering if a website sans blog is considered advertising. Does anyone know if it is? If so wouldn't it stand to reason that websites have to be submitted for review? In Florida (yeah, yeah, I know!) that doesn't seem to be the case.
Alright! I know I'm in there! If I don't come out, I'll have to come in after me!
Luckily, my brother, who's a lawyer in NYC, only has VLOGs and never BLOGs, so he's safe.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Having read through the rule changes, this seems to be limited to actual solicitation for services. Legal commentary or discussion of legal issues isn't anywhere in this, that I could see.
Basically, it applies the limitations currently in place for print and television ads to internet ads as well, which is a reasonable step to take... regulate all advertising, or regulate none.
Wearing a tin foil hat, I wonder if this is intended to reduce the amount of free legal advice available. Would this prevent providing anonymous "at yer own risk" legal advice? Surely it cant be illegal to give the public legal advice pro bono? Is it?
signed,
Silence Dogood
(google the name)
Anything that restricts lawyers... well it can't be a horrible thing. I know, its a flippant attitude, but the reality is, most lawyers waste crap loads of time. Blogging, especially in an effort to gain more business should be watched just as other advertisements.
Did anyone else see this headline and think it was talking about some bar-room brawl aimed at lawyers that spread all over new york, then want to join in? Pass the bud and punch another lawyer!!
Qxe4
...who read the headline, and immediately thought that some bar in New York was having problems with lawyers taking up the tables with their laptops, blogging away all night and taking the space away from paying patrons?
Will it matter if the servers hosting their blog are in another state? Can an organization tax something (even if it is considered an advertisement) if it occurs in another state? Also, who is going to actually enforce this if it occurs? I'm guessing they aren't going to hire people to scour the internet for lawyers not sending in their checks for every blog post.
Sue the Lawyers
or is that crossing the stream
I want to care about lawyers getting screwed but I'm too busy getting giddy over the thought of it.
Information flowing without our control! The horror.
-Nothing to see here, move along. You've seen this story before.
This covers lawyers? What about judges that post on legal or non-legal issues? What about law professors that post on (mostly) non-legal topics like Instapundit? Or law professors that do post on legal topics such as The Volokh Conspiracy? ... like a politician?
Para-legals? What about a member of the bar but not practicing
Some bar approval process sure isn't going to approve posts in a timely manner which is a key aspect of the blogosphere.
If the bar is allowed license to approve what lawyers say through one form of communication, it is but a step to other forms.
Yes that and the mounting server costs as he is slashdotted to oblivion.
I'm no expert on Greenwald, but doesn't he live in Brazil or something? Would this still affect him? Is he still practicing NY law from another country? Or is it Thomas Ellers that live in NY while Greenwald lives in Brazil?
"In the game of life, someone always has to lose. To me, if life were fair, that someone would always be Oklahoma." -DKR
...for the Bob Loblaw Law Blog
Somebody think of the chil^Wlawyers!
:)
And I really enjoy Firefox correcting me on that, too
Or is it the bar raising the Bar?
IIANYL, and this strikes me as a red herring. I've read through this, and the gist of the amendments have to deal with solicitations and advertisements as applied to modern technology. I can't read the arguments on the second link, but there are two things that were immediately clear from reading the amendments. First, they are narrowly construed to apply only to solicitation and advertisement, not publications in general. Second, it is in large part a technological amendment, to deal with new methods of advertisements like pop-up advertisements.
The first is the relevant part. I don't, on the face of it, see how this would preclude blogging. It would prevent blogging as a form of advertisement, but that's the very point of the restrictions on professional attorney and counselor publications. Advertisements for lawyers are permitted insofar, but only insofar, as the advertisement aids the public's ability to make an informed decision. Extensions of that are generally barred as being potentially misleading.
The second comment is relevant because it shows that they are technologically savvy. This gives some hope that even if this comes into force and causes problems, they will be conscious of the problems it creates and amend it appropriately. Incidentally, before this amendment, by interpretation, there appears to be some technical requirement to have every partner's name in the law firm's domain name.
Again, though, I haven't read the criticisms, and I've only given it a once-over. I don't pretend to be defending the NY bar; I don't know the arguments against it. I've just read through it and this is all I could come up with. If there is something there that unduly inhibits an attorney or counselor-at-law's ability to publish online, I would be interested in seeing that amended before it goes into force. If someone points a good argument out to me, I'll be sure to send along my comments, as a member of the bar.
The only criticism I could see was an extraterritorial clause which makes the law apply to out-of-NY lawyers who solicit or advertise their services in NY. But that seems reasonable, given the nexus between the out-of-NY lawyers and their purported NY services, and is totally unrelated to this slashdot article.
My first impression from the headline was that there was a tavern in New York that was taking a stand against lawyers doing their blogging while sitting around in bars. My first thought: "Bars in New York have wireless internet?"
at first i saw the topic and i was like why the heck are bars cracking down on lawers. did they get too drunk and blogged about service? then i realized they ment the NY state bar...
(yes i know i suck at spelling fell free to correct my grammar and/or spellin i dont care, im still not going to change
Finally, a legal situation where lawyers lose. Karma's a bitch.
Usually they're the only ones that come out ahead...
I feel a circular reference coming on...
Thank you. I agree that it is way over the top. I can see where big corporations -- who can pay top dollar for legal information -- would love to see the information become less available to the public. For example, how happy do you think the record labels would be to see my recording industry blog shut down?
Fortunately, though, the entire legal community in New York agrees with you as well, that it is way over the top. So I don't think the rules will go through in that overbroad format.
For those of you who haven't seen the rules, they're posted here.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
So, did anyone else read the headline and think that this was about a bar cracking down on a bunch of lawyers sitting around on their laptops on a free wifi connection and using up all their bandwidth? I suspect the story might be a bit more interesting if the did?
While limitations on advertising by lawyers have been around for a long time, they seem to have their roots in in pre-democratic times, when legal representation was to available to the wealthy if at all and the very practice of law was considered a somewhat questionable activity that had to be strictly regulated in order to be kept respectable. I fail to see any justification for restrictions on the speech of lawyers different from those that apply to everyone else. Lawyers would still be deterred from false advertising and libel by the existing laws of general application. Is there any good reason that censorship by the bar associations should not be eliminated?
Lawyers who complain about corruption in the courts often use blogs to expose it.
Look at Barbara Johnson's site http://www.falseallegations.com/
The bar association doesn't like it when lawyers start publicizing problems in their courts.
Thus, the Massachusetts bar is seeking to disbar Barbara Johnson and shut down her site.
Some person over on Groklaw who went by the nym "Allparadox" said he had to stop because as an ex lawyer he could be done for practising without a license just for merely expressing a personal opinion in a comment thread.
In our country we smile wryly, shake our heads in disbelief & say "Only in America..."
If lawyers want to do this to themselves imagine what they want to do to regular folk who blog.
... wondering about what a weird place New York must be for it to be having a bunch of lawyers sitting around in their favourite bar blogging about on their wifi laptops. And that they were soon about to be kicked out of this haven of theirs, possibly as they were annoying the rest of the patrons with their asocial behaviour.
ISO certified == THX certified
its -> it's
defentlay -> definitely
seams -> seems
If nobody ever corrects you, how will you ever learn?
If I recall, The Hammer had something to do with these regulations.
He advertised exclusively in upstate NY but never set foot out of Florida.
WikiCreole - a common wiki markup language
>> The New York bar has proposed new rules which would define blogging as advertising.
Jeez, you go somewhere for a quiet drink and look what happens.
The Association of the Bar of the City of New York has pointed out the First Amendment problems with the proposed rules and suggested detailed changes (pdf file) in them.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful