There are benefits to having 50 state laboratories. On the other hand, where internet activity is not clearly limited to a particular state, it gets really hard to figure out which rules you need to comply with. This gets even harder when you have a law firm operating in multiple states. What can you do with your website, blog, twitter, and LinkedIn profile may vary from state to state.

The trouble with the “false or misleading” standard is one of perspective. I can envision lots of recommendations that could be found as false or misleading depending on your perspective. “Doug is the best compliance guy out there and will do a great job keeping your company out of trouble.” Sounds nice. But am I “the best”? Can I keep “your company out of trouble?” I fear that the standard is applied in hindsight.

There is also the issue of how long the recommendation is up before it gets you into trouble. In many of these sites, you have no pre-approval of recommendations. It may go up, some gets into trouble and gets you into trouble, before you have a chance to take it down.

Thanks for sharing your personal opinion (and not that of your employer or any affiliated entity)!

But you take very clear language “A lawyer shall not make a false or misleading communication about the lawyer or the lawyer’s services” and then say that quickly gets us into the gray area. But it seems pretty clear on its face to me!

Then you take the leap to say if someone else posts something about you in a rec, then you have violated the rule. To me it seems pretty simple. Can’t you just remove a rec? It seems that if a rec gets close to the gray area, you simply remove it and send a private e-mail to the person explaining why you did so and thanking them for the rec anyway.

I’ll take issue with Toby, too. Call me old-fashioned but I like the concept of federalsim and the 50 states serving as laboratories to see what is a good idea and what isn’t. The Ethics Rules are probably 90% uniform and the few differences are often not that great. (Stipulated that advertising seems to be the exception.) The Florida Supreme Court recently suggested to the Florida Bar that lawyers should password protect all but the front page of their Websites and require registration. Of course that would make most everything invisible to the search engines and create other problems. I’m glad that rule won’t be adopted in all 50 states without hearing from the impacted lawyers.

I am sure Josh from Avvo (see his comment above) can share his frustration with trying to expose disciplinary information for lawyers.

Personally I think the limitations only hurt the people who need the information the most. Corporate counsel and regular purchasers of information have the means and networks to find good lawyers to help them. The average Joe needs a lawyer at the most crucial times in his life: buying a house, getting divorced, getting arrested and leaving his estate to his kids. It is the average Joe who really needs help and would benefit the most from having good, honest information about lawyers readily available to him.

The results of this patch-work of contrasting and conflicting advertising rules is that information becomes limited and clients have a hard time learning about lawyers and legal services. A friend of mine once commented that you can learn more about the TV you want to buy than the lawyer you want to hire. This is not a good situation and not conducive to expanding and enabling access to justice.

My 2 cents. I’ll come down off the soap-box now.

Thanks for starting my thinking on this. It is clear that the regulators for the securities industry and the legal industry have not gotten up to speed on Web 2.0. To the extent they have, they clearly frown on the use of many web 2.0 tools.