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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."
And lawyers don't have off-hours? How much do you pay your lawyers that they're on-call 24/7?
I don't think causing problems for lawyers is very bright. And, it may be lawyers, but they still have the right to blog whatever the hell they want.
...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?
Hardly.
This is just one occupation that is being censored. Because it is lawyers, nobody will stand up and argue. But what other occupations can be censored to make sure that you have to have your information certified on your blogs? Medical blogs? Engineering blogs? Government watchgroup blogs that happen to have a lawyer on their staff? Nutritional blogs? Technology blogs?
If this concept is slightly extended, anyone who has to be certified in any way will have to prove every statement they make on a blog is correct (and pay the fees to do so). There are a lot of jobs that require some sort of certification from the level of operating a nuclear reactor to the level of driving a truck.
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
I am a New York Lawyer. New York does not have a mandatory bar. The proposal goes to the Administrative Board of Courts which is government panal that has jurisdiction to regulate the practice of law. The bar association and the board are as annoyed as anyone by those late-night ads, but have been hampered by various court decisions in effectively regulatiing out the obnoxius bits. They are going after bloggers not because it is a good idea, but because they are low-lying fruit.
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?
Childhood friend of mine's dad is a local lawyer.
:-)
He normally goes upwards of $1K+/Hr. His Jr. lawyers in his firm are $250-500/hr and do most the work. He usually only bills his hours when the client insists he handle the case, or when in court and such.
I helped him with his PBX and a couple other little PC things. He was quoted an absurd ammount of money (to the tune of $8K) for what took me about an hour or so to do. I told him "no worries" and went out to lunch with him (he bought) and that was good enough for me.
Some years later I had a *real issue* at work with a way out of control manager (involved verbal and physical abuse, threats, and a knife). Gary gave me about 10 hours of his firms time and saved me from making some stupid, but not so obvious, mistakes when dealing with HR and legal. The end result is that I am still employed (so unfortunately is the manager) and I will never have to work with or under him again.
FF another few years to the link in my sig, again Gary to the rescue. He proof read my response to the C&D letter and blessed it as "an excellent response" along with some other wonder advice.
Moral? It never hurts to have an excellent lawyer think he owes you more than he does
-nB
Sorry for the ramble, just got going and wandered around O_o
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Assuming that the bar association is a private organization, I agree that they have the perogative to certify (or not certify) whoever they wish. However, one thing I've never seen properly explained: what keeps someone who isn't certified by the bar association from practicing law? After all, if it's legal for me to represent myself in court (or prepare my own legal documents, etc.) why can't I choose whoever I wish to assist me in this task, certified or no? If this is in fact not prohibited then what benefits or priviledges (besides credibility/reputation) would membership in a bar association provide, and why are they not extended to the general populace?
Or is it perhaps just a way of avoiding competition? It certainly does help to raise the barrier to entry into the legal profession, limiting the supply of legal services and driving up the price.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
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.
IANAL, but what you say makes sense. That is, the bar assn. would appear to be a monopoly, and as such one would think it would be subject to certain restrictions. That is, if the use their position as the only entity that will allow lawyers to work to force a laywer to choose between their livelihood and being able to express first admendment rights to free speech, then would the bar not be potentially violating Taft Hartley anti-trust regulations?
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007