What was it that, for so many years, made lawyers unable to advertise? Was there an actual law against doing so here in the United States?
IIRC, it was never a law, but rather part of the legal profession’s own canons of ethics that prohibited advertising.
When I was in law school (IANAL, but I do have a degree, and passed the bar), one of my classmates said that his dream was to set up his practice across the street from the D.C. jail, with a flashing neon sign that said, “Beat the Rap. $49.95”
Love your Location. Does this make you one of Brutus’ “smell herd?” 
Heh. In New york, there are advertisements for personal injury law down with stick figures. They show several accidents in which the victim is, mid accident, giving a thumbs up and smiling: one is a victim in midair having been thrown out the front windsheild in a crash. Now THAT’s advertising.
Oh, lest Brutus accuse me of misquoting him, that would be “smelly herd.” Such insightful comments deserve accurate quotation. Or would that be “inciteful?” Or “troglodyte?”
I actually never thought of anti-war folks as a particularly smelly lot. Freedom-hating, baby-killing traitors is of course, a given, but a tradition of showering before engaging in political activity goes back at least to “Going Clean For Gene” in 1968. The Truly Ripe among us have always had a little more courtesy than Brutus seems to give them credit for.
I believe that at some point in the 1970s, the US Supreme Court held that lawyers have a 1st amendment right to advertise.
It’s an interesting and controversial issue. On the one hand, there is something a little unseemly about some attorney ads. On the other hand, there are lots of common folks out there who don’t realize that they have valuable legal rights.
On the other hand, the “man” has lots of lawyers. Arguably, attorney advertising can help correct this imbalance.
The case was Bates v. State Bar of Arizona, 433 U.S. 350 (1977).
Lucwarm:
“…there is something a little unseemly about some attorney ads.”
As well, Lucwarm, there is something a little unseemly about some attorneys.
And one such unseemly characteristic is ** greed**. And greed is a green-eyed thing that pits a man against his fellow men.
Consider…
The study of law is a easy trade to master. We hide lawbooks from prisoners so that the inmates won’t flood the legal market when sprung.
What a con-game. State bar associations, through contrived exams and educational requirements, do thier dead-level best to limit the number of practioneers who are allowed to practice their leacherous profession. Judges, who are lawyers, make sure that their fellow bedfellows get paid their absurd fees first, and their poor clients get to suck on the hind tit unless legal fees have squeezed the last tit dry.
We oughta pass a law against this legal mugging by shysters, but our legislators, who are lawyers, have taken blood-money from lawyers, who are lawyers, so they just whistle a show tune and look the other way.
Meanwhile in America, justice is not tendered to the poor.
And if you are in a socialistic union (the Americian Bar Association) that limits the supply to a union’s (the courts)contrived demand ( the labyrinth of convoluted laws by legislators), then, unless you are real, real, real, dumb, you get rich.
What a racket.
Agree, with the key word being “some.” For what it’s worth, my view is that attorneys should be held to a stricter standard than other folks. But let’s face reality – there are good and bad people in every profession.
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Certainly there’s an element of protectionism. And that’s troubling. But it seems a little odd to me that you would object to the fact that there are fewer lawyers rather than more.
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That brush is a little broad, no? Many lawyers help folks who are poor and unsophisticated assert their rights against a hostile establishment.
This must be some kind of universal Lawyer thing… in Brazil its considered bad form to advertise for lawyers. The Lawyers Organization I think formally prohibits it… and can ban lawyers who do so.
I’m sure the folks who washed out of my first year of law school would be interested to hear that. **
Que? One of the real problems the judiciary faces is an avalanche of frivolous pro se filings from prisoners who have nothing but time and law books on their hands. **
What a lawyer does can have serious, lifelong consequences to his client; that being the case, it makes sense to be sure practitioners are reasonably competent. It’s the same rationale used for licensing doctors. Or do you think any John Doe off the street should be able to hawk his skills with a scalpel? **
I’m not sure what you’re referring to. If the lawyer is paid by the hour, then the court has nothing to do with the fee arrangement (save for enforcing the contract if the client doesn’t pay, same as you would for a plumber). If it’s a contingency fee arrangement, the court is similarly uninvolved except where the fee might be considered too high. Yes, that’s right, courts have held some contingency fee arrangements as too remunerative to the lawyers. So much for your vaunted conspiracy. **
The ABA is not a mandatory organization to belong to for any lawyer. I, for example, am not an ABA member.
I am licensed in New York and Texas. I am not a member of the New York bar association, and am only a member of the Texas bar association because Texas has an “integrated bar” that mandates membership as part of your license.
In short: you don’t have a damned inkling of what you’re talking about.
For what it’s worth, some of my fees have to be approved by an administrative agency. Frequently my fee will be cut to something well below what I agreed on with my client. For example, about a month ago I had a matter which I had agreed with my client to handle for $800. My fee was cut to $400, which is all I could legally collect. Note that the folks who set up this system are legislators and other attorneys.
Imagine if you agreed with a plumber that he would install a new hot water heater for $800 and after the job was done, the Board of Plumbers cut the charge to $400. Nice, eh?
Not that I seriously object. As I mentioned earlier, I believe that attorneys should be held to a stricter standard than other professionals. But to argue that there is some sort of conspiracy among lawyers to enable lawyers to take advantage of people is just silly.
Actually, luc, you’re right, and I can think of other contexts where the courts limit fees. I know they scrutinize the bills for the debtor’s attorney in bankruptcy cases pretty closely, for example. The courts, when they do involve themselves in billing matters, always ratchet the fee down, not up.
Sorry** lucwarm**, my affected propensity for enterering a discusssion in a round about way by sneaking in the back door is most times ineffective, it seems, in getting across my point.
More directly my point is…
The Medicare blimp flies from football stadium to football stadium to advertise Medicare. Why? There is no usefull transfer if information. There is only one Medicare and only one federal government and only one set of taxpayers to pay for the capricious travels of the Medicare blimp. "Oh look! " the taxpayers say, “Isn’t it lovely? There goes our blimp!”
In California the longshoremen (people who load and unload ships) make one hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year. They have a union. The union won’t let mexicans unload ships. The mexicans would unload ships for twenty thousand dollars a year. So in effect, the consumer pays each union member one hundred thousand dollars a year to unload ships.
I do so agree. In a set of mass murderers there are good mass murderers and bad mass murderers. But mass murderers as a group are an unsavory lot, and imposing standards on the mass murder proffession will hardly change the harsh opinions of those who have been murdered.
No no no, ** lucwarm**, I don’t dislike lawyers. I dislike the injustice that is brought about by their persuit of the buck. If we open the doors to allow all who can speak english to practice law before the american courts then the best practioneers can rise to the top and command the best fees. And, at least, the poor among us can afford a poor lawyers and have representation in court.
They say. Tell that to the poor destitute widow woman who spent the last of her savings on legal fees trying to prevent the wrongful take over of her land from realators where she provided an exit shelter for fifty or so neglected animals. At the last minute her attorney demanded another two thousand dollars cash before he would go to court.
Last week, in desperation, she phoned in a plea for help on a local radio talk show begging for the services of an animal loving attorney who would take his fees in payments through time.
That was Tuesday. She will go to court Monday. Alone.
So right you really are, Ranshak, in Alabama our lawyers are allowed to advertise only if they include this anti-advertising disclaimer…
No attempt is make in this message to claim that the legal services offered here are better that any other legally recognized member of the Alabama State Bar Association, nor any worse.
(I forget the exact wording, but that’s the gist.)
And the beat goes on…
This is more or less how things work now. There are a whole gaggle of law schools out there, many of which you barely need a pulse to get into, many of which offer night programs for those who work during the day, and many of which offer plenty of financial aid. And the bar exam weeds people out, true, but no more so than the medical boards weed out unqualified doctors.
Anyone can become a lawyer with a little hard work and study. **
Assuming you aren’t leaving out relevant facts, she should bring a malpractice claim against her lawyer and also bring a complaint to the state bar. Once an attorney begins representing a client on a specific matter, the rules of ethics make it difficult to back out of that representation.
Of course, it’s nifty how you’ve prejudged the case. Being poor and destitute doesn’t necessarily make you right. It’s entirely possible that the realtors are in the right here. There’s no way to tell without knowing more about the specific case. **
If some poor person phoned in a plea for plumbers to help her with a flooding basement, payment to be made over time, and no one replied, would you seriously consider that valid evidence with which to impeach the entire group of people practicing in the plumbing profession?
No I wouldn’t Dewey, most plumbers pursue their profession with no pretence of altruism, and their right to plumb is guaranteed by our Consitution. But the right to a fair trial is guaranteed to –>all <– Americans by the Constitution, so here is the point that has thus far been verboten…
**Are all Americans receiving equal justice under the law or are lawyers whoring themselves to the higest bidder? ____ ** RSVP.
Ignore him, Dewey. He’s got no money.
Milum: Why is it OK for plumbers to charge what the market will bear but not OK for lawyers to do the same? Why is it “whoring” for one and not for the other?
Why do you think you have the right to tell me what to charge for my labor? What are you, some kind of communist?
The constitution mandates that trials procedures be fair, but it does not mandate a right to the presence of an attorney except in certain nontrivial criminal matters. That’s it. Nothing more. There is nothing in the constitution that says I, minty or any other lawyer has to take on your case.
(Minty: shhh! You’ll give away the Evil Greedy Lawyer conspiracy!)
Disagree. Mass murderers are pretty much all bad guys.
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That might very well happen. However, since it is often difficult for consumers to evaluate how good their attorneys are, there is a danger of market failure. I’m not sure what the result would be, but the current situation is certainly not indefensible.
Let me ask you this: Do you agree that if we got rid of education and licensing requirements for electricians, it would be cheaper to hire an electrician? Would you support such a reform? Why or why not?
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As long as we’re sharing anecdotes, let me share a few: Just a few weeks ago, I signed up an auto mechanic who had just been fired from his job. He was lower-middle class, uneducated, and black, and his former boss was holding his tools (worth $10k to $20k), claiming that he owed money.
For 200 bucks, I researched the situation and wrote the former employer a letter explaining exactly why what he was doing was illegal. He agreed to return the tools.
Another client took out a student loan to pay for a year course at a vocational school. The school admitted her even though she was in way over her head. She failed her first exam a few weeks into the program and the school suspended her and refused to refund any of her tuition. She complained to the authorities but nobody would listen to her. The school ignored her complaints.
I spent a few hours researching the situation and reviewing the file. I filed suit a few weeks later specifying exactly what laws the school had violated. Shortly thereafter, the school contacted me and we worked out a settlement that my client was very happy with.
Anyway, I’m sorry to pat myself so heavily on the back. But the reality is that many people, particularly those who are poor, uneducated, and are members of minority groups, get abused by organizations and institutions. These victims know that they’ve been wronged, but aren’t sophisticated or articulate enough to get effective redress. A good attorney will listen when nobody else will, and will help his or her client get the money he or she deserves. (And hopefully make a decent fee for himself or herself in the process!)
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Most courts will grant a postponement to a party who needs more time to find an attorney. Also, the reality is that this person is likely lying or at least not sharing the whole story. Why do I believe this? Because I see it happen all the time that people claim their attorney abandoned them when in fact the attorney never agreed to represent them in the first place.
It happens to me on a regular basis. It’s certainly possible that the woman’s attorney pulled the rug out from under her, but I wouldn’t believe that until I heard her attorney’s side of the story.
That’s a peeve of mine – when people assume or imply that there is something inherently wrong with lawyers trying to make money. Doing bad things to make money is bad. Just trying to make money is . . a-ok in my book.
When potential clients try to give me this sort of BS, I usually tell them “you’re in this building right now for the exact same reason I am – to GET MONEY.”
Make no mistake – I practice law for the exact same reason non-lawyers go to work every day: to MAKE MONEY. I love what I do and I love helping people. I follow the rules and I don’t take advantage of people. But I practice law to MAKE MONEY.