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."

Comments

Re:Your rights online?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Why censor lawyers?

[belmolis]

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?

Re:Or...

[networkBoy]

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