Florida Legal Ads Restrictions Painted as Silly or Arbitrary by WSJ

Posted by Alan Childress

A useful link and nice summary by Michael Froomkin (Miami) on his Discourse.net blog, relevant to our readers on legal ethics, is found in his post entitled WSJ Says Florida Leads the Nation:

According to the Wall St. Journal’s Objection! Funny Legal Ads Draw Censure, Florida leads the nation in restrictions on the use of animals in lawyer advertising.

Tigers are OK. Lions probably. But no sharks or pit bulls. Go figure.

The article is limited only to animals and TV ads; had they mentioned advertising rules more generally, and especially the evolving rules relating to law firm web pages, they’d have had to mention New York state’s increasingly restrictive policies, quite possibly worse than Florida’s.

In the WSJ article, Florida’s bar counsel says it’s about protecting the public, while an affected lawyer suing the bar on First Amendment grounds “sees it differently. ‘The advertising rules are bizarre,’ he says. ‘The established legal bar pines for the Eisenhower era.’ “