Here is the Florida Supreme Court’s 53 page opinion announcing the new rules. Here is a good summary and review of the ongoing issues that the new rules don’t clear up.
The big takeaway is requiring attorneys to cite “objectively verifiable standard” when making a claim about their legal abilities. As several posts have suggested, the use of the word “objective” is problematic. Are ratings “objective?” These rules also apply to images. A photo of a car with a smashed fender is okay but a mother taking a crying child from a wrecked car is not. This seems like a slippery slope and requiring someone to make subjective determinations about “objective” vs. “subjective” images.
Time to Throw Out the Prohibition on “False” Advertising?
In this time of Yelp, Avvo, Facebook and the back and forth of personal opinion about all kinds of services, is there really a need for lawyers to be held to a different standard than plumbers? When attorney advertising was a one way affair, the need to insure that consumers weren’t duped into hiring a lawyer made sense. But every lawyer can be “Googled,” “Yelped” and “Avvoed” and opinions about them are outside of the lawyers’ power to change except through ill-advised defamation lawsuits. The problem is that judges and bar associations are trying to control information in way direction (attorney to consumer) but have no control in another and increasingly powerful direction (consumer to consumer about attorneys).
