Once again, attorneys upset that their profession is held up to ridicule would have much less of a problem if attorneys were more concerned about the behavior that led to the ridicule than about the ridicule itself. Evan Schaeffer reraises the issue of the ILR billboard, and posts the first photo of the campaign. Here’s the full text:
Please Don’t Feed
The Trial LawyersLawsuit Abuse Hurts Illinois. Support Legal Reform.
Entertainingly enough, the billboard (previously described as insulting) doesn’t call lawyers names—it is simply based on the premise that the reader will already have a negative opinion of trial lawyers, which is hardly the fault of the ILR. The text of the billboard shows that Evan is mistaken when he accuses it of being aimed at juries: it is, rather, aimed at voters, as legal reform is an important election topic in 2006 judicial and legislative and gubernatorial elections, and the trial lawyers have their own campaign designed to get supporters of the litigation lobby in office and on the bench. (Evan may be correct that the billboard is “ugly and obnoxious,” though I can’t recall ever seeing a billboard that wasn’t.) Evan also has some snide remarks about the quality and intelligence of comments supposedly left by Overlawyered readers, so if you do visit Evan’s site, please be polite, even though the plaintiffs’ lawyers who comment there may be rude to you personally.
11 Comments
The inequality of the playing field bothers me a bit, since advertising by lawyers is highly regulated, while advertising against lawyers is not. I suspect that a billboard by a plaintiff’s firm saying, “please don’t feed the insurance companies” would face about 50-50 odds of being banned by the local bar association.
If that’s your concern, you need not worry. No one has so much as threatened with the lightest of sanctions anyone associated with the plaintiffs’ bar front-group Americans for Insurance Reform for issuing repeated reports with false information and data accusing insurance companies of wrongdoing. Dickie Scruggs and Jim Hood have been able to publicly criticize insurance companies in Mississippi with fallacious claims without fear of retribution.
panthers next target for Florida Bar Ad Counsel?
While we’re talking about lawyer self-image and the image of lawyers, let me point out that Ted Frank and Evan Schaeffer continue to trade jabs relating to the Don’t Feed the
“The inequality of the playing field bothers me a bit…”
Yeah, me, too. The lawyers have billions of dollars available from the insane tabacco settlement (among other travestis), while the groups trying to get this reform are generally made up of people who have already been mugged by lawyers, leaving them with less money (as much of their money was taken by lawyers).
Oh, and lawyers can sue people themselves. Non-lawyers have to… hire lawyers to do it for them.
I believe that the limitations on lawyer advertising are applied to the solicitation of business, not to expression of political or public policy views. I can’t imagine a legitimate reason why “please don’t feed the insurance companies” would be silenced, by a BBO or otherwise — especially when connected to pending legislation.
For the upsetting ad file:
http://www.magnetmail.net/images/clients/ATLA/attach/ATLAUSATodayAd041206.pdf
This is called unclean hands.
Ted, your post was going to matters of taste and style, not accuracy (no one is going to hear “please don’t feed the trial lawyers” and think that this group is on a disinterested search for objective truth), but your point is well taken. A lawyer lobbying group presumably would not be subject to the same speech restrictions as a law firm (as Supremacy Claus points out).
You rely on “the text of the billboard” to make your point that the intended audience of the billboard isn’t juries. What you didn’t point out is that the words “Lawsuit Abuse Hurts Illinois — Support Legal Reform” are in tiny print. I saw the billboard yesterday along the highway crossing into St. Louis from Illinois, and I had trouble reading the fine print from the car. What’s impossible to miss is the giant headline “Please Don’t Feed the Trial Lawyers.”
The difference in type size is shown in the picture of the billboard at my website.
Evan,
I don’t know why you just straight to juries as the intended audience.
1) It’s clearly intended to be political speach, as it’s about a legislative process to reform the system.
2) Even assuming that you just can’t believe that for some reason, the jury has VERY little control over the “feeding” of the lawyers – they are the LAST step in the profess, and even if they rule against the plaintiff, the defense lawyers still make money, and, in many cases, the plaintiff’s lawyer still manages to make money, too (settlements to avoid appeal are not uncommon). The FIRST people in the process are the PLAINTIFFS – they instigate the whole thing (well, or allow the lawyer to do so, in cases where they are contacted by the ambulance-chasing lawyer). The PLAINTIFF would also make a MUCH better target than juries, as many cases that end up “feed[ing] the trial lawyers” never see a jury, anyway.
In short, I strongly feel that you are jumping quite far to a pretermined conclusion.
that “unclean hands” add could be made almost exactly the same with lawyers as the target. They’ve taken in huge sums of money, and they’ve got huge lobby groups in Washington, etc, etc.
Pot, meet Kettle.
The print ad confirms that the target is elections: “Don’t feed the trial lawyers. Demand that your elected officials fix the flaws in the justice system. Require fairness from your judges. For a copy of the survey and to learn how you can help, visit http://www.instituteforlegalreform.org.”