GoogleAdWord Censure Opinion

The censure order of the North Carolina State Bar Grievance Committee of the attorney “who employed other attorneys’ names and names of law firms in a keyword advertising campaign through GoogleAdWords program” is linked here.

The findings

On April 27, 2012, the North Carolina State Bar Ethics Committee published 2010 Formal Ethics Opinion 14, which states that an attorney’s purchase or use of another attorney’s name in an Internet search engine’s keyword-advertising program is dishonest and therefore violates Rule 8.4( c) of the Rules of Professional Conduct. After the publication of this ethics opinion, you continued to intentionally add inappropriate keywords to your Google AdWords advertising campaign; your inappropriate keywords consisted of other individual attorney names (including attorney nicknames), names of law firms, and names of judicial officials.

Although you claimed that any inclusion of inappropriate keywords in your advertising campaign was inadvertent and was the result of your bulk-purchase of keywords suggested by Google, your history of keyword purchases demonstrates that you specifically selected and approved a number of these keywords for inclusion in your advertising campaign.

 It is your duty to scrutinize all keywords prior to adding the keyword to your advertising campaign, regardless of whether you created the keyword or whether the keyword was suggested to you. Your intentional inclusion of other attorneys’ names and law firms in your keyword advertising campaign is dishonest…

 It is somewhat noteworthy that the attorney was suspended from practice in 1993 for charging telephone calls to adult entertainment numbers to the Guilford County Courthouse to the tune of over $8,700.

He was convicted of a criminal offense as a result. (Mike Frisch)