Last year, almost a year ago, I posted this commentary about the Allied Injury Group’s TV ad that embodied all of the horrors the legal profession used for a century to ban lawyer marketing and advertising (thus forgetting about the First Amendment thingy, you know, just like today’s progressives..). In the process, I managed to make an unethical mistake, mislabeling the slimy law firm involved and calling it the Allied Law Group, a non-slimy law firm that was none too pleased. I apologized profusely to the representative of that firm who called to ream me out and made the correction pronto.
The main thrust of the original post was that the ads seemed to present the silly character giving the pitch as a lawyer, and no matter how unlikely that seemed it was a bright line ethics violation as misleading advertising.
This morning I saw the firms’ new add, which dropped at the end of March. That notice, with chase lights running around “not a lawyer,” appeared a few second in.
Good. We ethicists have to take our meager victories, however rare, to maintain our sanity.
