Lawyers in the Yellow Pages

Abstract

In the 1977 case, Bates v. State Bar of Arizona, the United States Supreme Court, for the Ž rst time, provided widespread protection for attorneys seeking to advertise their services. The move made sense from a commercial standpoint. As the size of the legal profession grew, competition for clients — particularly among those attorneys in less established practices — rose as well. Advertising provided a way for lawyers to enhance their visibility and expand their clientele. Since the Court’s landmark decision, attorney expenditures on advertising have soared. In many cities, lawyers blanket the mass media with their promotional messages. They advertise on television and radio, as well as in newspapers. The best place to Ž nd lawyer advertising, however, is the medium in which attorneys invest the most money: the Yellow Pages. This article takes a close look at attorney Yellow Pages advertising, which has received surprisingly little attention from scholars. Given the importance of the Yellow Pages to attorneys who advertise, these volumes are worth close scrutiny. I conduct a content analysis of lawyers’ Yellow Pages ads in four cities — New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Atlanta — identifying those icons attorneys most commonly used within these ads. I then attempt to decode selected advertisements in order to more fully analyze the ways that icons, in tandem with text, work to convey a variety of messages. In particular, I look to see how attorneys convey uncontroversial messages explicitly while expressing more complicated messages — about race, gender and qualitative superiority, among other things — through their icons.