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Editor: Ben W. Glass
Profession: Attorney at Law

Category: Ethics and Regulation

Ocala, Florida Personal Injury Attorney Craig Cannon sent me this news from Florida. According to an article by Jill Krueger in the Orlando Business Journal, the Florida Bar's Board of Governors is set to take final action in Web site advertising rules.

The Florida Bar's board of governors is scheduled to decide whether to adopt proposed changes in how lawyers' Web sites are treated under Bar rules at a meeting scheduled for Dec. 8 in Key Biscayne. A report by the Special Committee on Website Advertising Rules recommends that Web sites be treated like other types of advertising under Bar rules. Currently, Web sites enjoy two main exceptions to Florida Bar general advertising rules that would no longer be exempt: An attorney can include past results on a Web site if the information is true and not misleading, and can make statements on a Web site that characterize the quality of legal services if those statements are true. General advertisements don't have these two exemptions. Lawyers currently don't have to submit Web site content to the Florida Bar to ensure their compliance with its rules and would not have to do so in the future under the changes.

My comments that I sent to the Orlando Business Journal were:

Regarding the article about the Florida Bar/lawyer advertising and the Internet. By way of background, I am a Virginia attorney but I teach "Effective, Ethical and Outide the Box Marketing for Attorneys" and we recently completed a seminar in Orlando. While Florida's rules are generally no different from other states' rules, the folks at the Florida Bar giving advice and/or interpreting those rules tend to have an overly restrictive view of what attorneys can and can't do with advertising.

The issue is not as simple as "well, you have an Internet site you must be advertising." Good attorney web sites are informational and provide a great service precisely because they get valuable information to consumers not only about the attorney, but about the legal problem (and solution to the problem) at hand. So, it's really violative of the First Amendment, I would think, to lump all websites (just because they may be written by an attorney) together with out a look at the actual content. For example, my firms website, www.BenGlassLaw.com, has hundreds of pages of information and documents which hopefully educate the consumer. Does the website promote me? Certainly, but if you were to look at the article on the site, you would see that the primary focus is education.

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I agree with the gentleman quoted in the recent article that good attorney websites are more like "answers to requests for information" and, by and large, should not be regulated at all by the Florida Bar.