Caveat client

In a more innocent time, not so very long ago, Maine lawyers who advertised on TV showed themselves in earnest close-ups, stressed their experience and promised nothing more than doing their level and honest best. Then came little dramas with conniving insurance executives and a well-known but currently underemployed actor telling viewers the lawyer he’s boosting means business. From there, it was but a short hop to three lawyers wielding wooden clubs, threatening to settle things by busting some heads.

The Maine Supreme Judicial Court is understandably disturbed by this galloping decline in professional comportment in the profession it oversees. By law, lawyers are officers of the court and certainly the state’s highest court has every right to set high standards and to have high expectations. Judges jealously protect the serious and sober atmosphere of the courtroom for good reason – it sends a powerful message to all that judgment is based upon facts and the law, not upon trickery, stunts or acting ability.

So in response to complaints about the increasingly aggressive tone of the TV spots, the court has asked an advisory committee to study lawyer advertising and perhaps make recommendations on how it should be regulated. No one wants his or her profession degraded from within and the justice system deserves special protection, but the court should be wary of any regulation beyond the letter of the law.

The letter of the law already prohibits advertising – any advertising for any product or service – that is misleading or deceptive. The court may not like ads that portray lawyers as thugs, and why lawyers would willingly portray themselves as such is a mystery, but the First Amendment does, after all, protect one’s right to make a fool of oneself. The United States Supreme Court ruled more than 15 years ago that lawyer advertising does not have to be dignified; Maine does not need to put itself on the defensive end of a free-speech lawsuit that essentially already has been settled.

There is, however, a consumer-education issue here. Most people do not have a long-standing relationship with a lawyer, they need a lawyer only a few times in their lives and could use some help in knowing more than they can learn in a 30-second ad. Such help already is available through the Maine Bar Association’s Lawyer Information and Referral Service (www.mainebar.org), which provides free pamphlets on a wide variety of common legal situations and can help connect a person in need of a lawyer with the right lawyer. For a fraction of what it would cost to defend the state against a lawsuit alleging abridgment of constitutional rights, the court could mount an effective and dignified ad campaign of its own to increase the public’s awareness of this benefit.

But another reason the court should not attempt to regulate these ads past the misleading or deceptive standard is that, for most people, a dumb lawyer ad performs the valuable service of telling them what lawyer not to call. If the court should decide to educate the public on the right way to choose a lawyer, it might include a reminder that, just as the person who serves as his own attorney has a fool for a client, so, too, does the lawyer whose client falls for that wooden club routine.