Abstract
The legal practitioners in Malaysia are restricted from publicising, advertising and marketing themselves on the grounds of fiduciary relationship with clients, the duty to serve the public and it is professionally undignified. Despite the advancement of the Information, Communication and Technology, lawyers are restricted in utilising it for publicity, advertising and marketing. At the same time, the public is deprived of information to engage the best lawyers of their choice. Furthermore, while other countries such as European Union, United Kingdom, Singapore and Australia have moved forward, the Malaysian legal profession remains unchanged. This concept paper investigates the adequacy of the Legal Profession (Publicity) Rules 2001(“LPPR 2001”) in legalising publicity, advertising and marketing. This paper adopts a qualitative research methodology with doctrinal and comparative approaches. Firstly, this paper focuses on content analysis of statutes as the primary source of law. Secondly, content analysis on secondary sources of law including journal articles, and online sources. Thirdly, conducting a comparative study by analysing the primary and secondary sources of law in other jurisdictions. This paper explains that lawyers must be allowed to innovate into new methods in publicising, advertising and marketing themselves. Society will greatly benefit from this as they will be more informed and knowledgeable in engaging the service of lawyers of their choice. This paper ends by suggesting that there is a dire need to legalise the publicity, advertising and marketing of the legal profession in Malaysia. Thus, this research is significant to the development of the legal profession in Malaysia.
Highlights
Most legal practitioners are attempting to publicise, advertise and market their services in a new, different and creative way especially in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic
Given the lack of such academic research and writing on this particular issue, this paper investigates the adequacy of the LPPR 2001 in legalising the publicity, advertising and marketing of the Legal Profession in Malaysia
Today the legal profession is in the middle of rapid and continuous change
Summary
Most legal practitioners are attempting to publicise, advertise and market their services in a new, different and creative way especially in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. Advertising is defined as the business of trying to persuade people to buy products or services (Cambridge Dictionary, 2021) It is any paid form of non-personal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods and services through mass media such as newspapers, magazines, television or radio by an identified sponsor (Kotler, 1984). It entails content marketing (focuses on creating and distributing information relevant to prospects’ needs), inbound marketing (earn the attention of customers), social media marketing (focuses on providing users with content they find valuable and want to share across their social networks), search engine optimisation (appears among the top unpaid search results on search engines) and search engine marketing (a tool that companies use to grow their website traffic through paid online advertising (Woschnick, 2021). Publicity, advertising and marketing in legal profession is restricted mainly because of three principles It is a well-established principle that firstly, a lawyer stands in a fiduciary relationship to his client. This means that its members themselves, and not some government agencies, regulate, discipline and control all aspects of the practice of their profession (Vogel, 1986)
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