Where advertisement is not appropriate

The teachers of Legal Ethics, a generation ago, must have overdone their efforts. They lectured that the practice of law was so very noble that while there was a business side to the profession, it was not to be promoted like any business endeavor. If their instructions were to be carefully observed, advertisement was not a favored act. To them, lawyers should not advertise their calling and if they must, they were supposed to be limited to giving away calling cards as the best form of advertising. And such cards would only contain the name of the attorney, his address and his phone number. There was no such vivid description as “criminal law expert”, or “specializes in civil law” etc.

Those Ethics professors nurtured into the minds of their students (therefore, aspiring lawyers) that as soon as the latter would pass the bar, they would be entitled to hang a “caratola” at their home or at their designated law office. But, it was not appropriate to place such signboard just anywhere else. Even the size of the allowable signboard was somehow regulated. It was enough if it could guide would-be clients to their law office.

According to their teachings, a lawyer’s most effective advertisement was by way of “word of mouth”. But, not by the lawyer’s own mouth. Reputation. His clientele would multiply because satisfied clients would endorse his services to friends and acquaintances and in so doing, speak highly of the lawyer’s dedication, depth of knowledge and integrity.

Those teachers, quite consequently,  produced a different breed of lawyers. The attorney’s they churned out from law schools would not yield to the temptation of crowing about their own achievements. While eloquent to speak of others works, they would choose to hold their tongue in describing even the greatest moments of their law practice because doing so was, even if not entirely unethical, inappropriate.

You must have noticed that in the paragraphs above, I took great care in using the past tense. That was really intended to drive home a point.

Few weeks ago, I was startled to see, in a newspaper, something that I was not really prepared for. Was I getting too old, I asked myself, to be resistant to life’s innovations? By all appearances and to distinguish it from legitimate news that could always find space, it was a paid advertisement carried in our local dailies.  Its specific peculiarity caught my eye. There was no doubt that it promoted the service of a professional or group of professionals, who, as of the date of the release of the paper, remained unidentified. Thus, it looked to me like a business proposition only that the advertiser was not mentioned.

The fact was that the advertisement called the attention of the relatives of those whose lives perished in the horrible tragedy involving the Princess of the Stars.  In a manner of speaking, someone offered, in a newspaper advertisement, legal assistance to the heirs of the maritime accident. The ad could be taken to mean as encouraging people to seek the advertiser’s legal advice that could include filing cases in court

Times have changed. In so far as trial advocacy is concerned, the present is seemingly not what it was in the past.  There are new dimensions in the practice of law that were beyond the strict purview of “old teachers of legal ethics”. Such a thing as advertising a legal expert’s service was considered a no-no then. Maybe because there were few trial attorney’s before and those in the legal practice enjoyed fame to some degree. But, now in every corner within the block there are lawyers. There has got to be a need to communicate to people of the availability of someone’s expertise. I believe that it was in that concept that the advertisement was made. People need to know that the advertiser existed and it was he, (or they) who could provide direction to the legal woes of the victims of the tragedy.

But, because I probably belong to the antiquated genre of a lawyer, I felt that the advertisement was itself a professional tragedy. 

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