Lawyer Advertising Research Articles

Settlement implications of lawyer advertising

This paper explores how informative attorney advertising influences the settlement probability and/or offer, using a screening framework. Plaintiffs are privately informed about the expected judgment and their level of ability in controlling the lawyer. More attorney advertising increases case filings by plaintiffs with high or low ability to different extents such that the defendant's beliefs about the plaintiff's type change with the level of attorney advertising. How attorney advertising influences settlement outcomes then depends on whether the defendant offers a higher settlement offer to more able plaintiffs.

Advokato profesija: prieštaringas jos pobūdis ir kontrolė

This paper analyzes the status of attorneyship as one of the state-controlled legal professions. It should be noted that although the public recognizes the importance of lawyer’s assistance, in the cultural context lawyer is one of the most ridiculed and criticized legal professions. Such assessment of attorneyship depends on the controversial nature of this legal profession, i.e. first, the lawyer uses his profession to earn income for himself, his family and his business; second, the lawyer is obliged to unconditionally pursue his client’s interests to a widest extent possible; and third, the lawyer is one of those participating in the justice implementation and, as a result, is the subject to higher standards of behaviour, normally associated with both formal legal requirements and ethical requirements. The lawyer’s personal interest is mostly in line with his commitment to act exclusively for the benefit of the client, because protection of the client’s interests determines the lawyer’s reputation and income. However, obligations of the lawyer, as the justice implementation participant, often force the lawyer to act otherwise than they would normally act in order to benefit their client. At this date, the controversial nature of attorneyship in Lithuania has yet not reached the level of doctrinal debate; therefore, it is difficult to assess what theoretical models could be considered appropriate when solving this problem. Such divergence leads to the demand that attorneyship would be controlled by external means. The general external control over attorneyship may be exercised by both lawyers’ professional association (the judicial control over attorneyship in a particular case is not addressed in this article). The paper provides points proving that attorneyship is Lithuania’s least state-controlled profession as compared to other similar professions, e.g. bailiff or notary. The Lithuanian Bar Association bears the primary responsibility for lawyers’ ethical performance. After assessing the published data on the Lithuanian Bar Association activities, it can be stated that the control provided is insufficient, often identifying and responding to formal violations, such as non-payment of contributions and failure to submit the public liability insurance policy. There is no evidence that the Lithuanian Bar Association has a clear position concerning the lawyers’ ethics and expresses it in such a way that no lawyer could question assessment of behaviour non-compliant with ethical principles. Even more questions arise in the light of the latest trends. The Supreme Court of the Republic of Lithuania asked the European Court of Justice for a preliminary ruling in determining whether in certain cases the lawyer, providing legal services to an individual, should be recognized as a business person, his client as a consumer, and the legal aid contract as a consumer contract. At the same time, a legal prerequisite for the lawyer advertising has been created in Lithuania, which had been strictly prohibited until recently. There are grounds for believing that the lawyer will be viewed more as a business person than as a person involved in the justice implementation process. As a result, the extent of ethical requirements to the lawyer may change.

Problems of the Lawyer Advertising to state a Lawyer as a specialist

Problems of the Lawyer Advertising to state a Lawyer as a specialist

An Empirical Analysis of Consumers' Attitudes Toward Legal Services Advertising

The purpose of this study is to investigate current attitudes and opinions of lawyer advertising and to compare them to the attitudes expressed 15 years ago. This study was designed to determine (a) consumers' attitudes toward advertising by attorneys and (b) whether age, occupation, income, education, and/or sex of consumer accounted for any significant difference in attitudes toward attorneys who advertise. This study investigates possible changes in attitudes of consumers toward lawyer advertising over a 15-year period. It replicates a survey done in 1988 and uses the same questionnaire and the same population to compare responses longitudinally. The study seems to confirm the belief of many marketing professionals that advertising and marketing clearly have a place in the future of legal services. Although the present image of lawyers is not positive, most of the 2003 respondents agreed that it is proper for lawyers to advertise. The study also confirmed that quality of service and the reputation of lawyers were more important to the 2003 consumers than the price.

Attorney Advertising

The study reported here does not address the image of the legal profession. We do not purport to defend or condemn advertising. Rather, we look first to the decision by Justice Blackmun in Bates v. Arizona State Barand other sources to determine the real objective of lawyer advertising. We then conducted a study to determine if those objectives are met. The objectives identified were to attract clients for new and small law firms and to attract the kinds of clients who have not historically used the services of attorneys. Based on other studies, we determined that these clients have low incomes, have low levels of education, are not Caucasian and have not used an attorney's services before. A survey of more than 1500 subjects produced data that shows attorney advertising does meet the objectives identified by Justice Blackmun.

Lawyers in the Yellow Pages

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.

Victorian Divorce Anxiety and the Lawyer–Statesman in Fin de Siecle Advertising, Literature, and Debate

In 1908, the American Bar Association banned as unethical all forms of advertising and soliciting by lawyers. Henceforth, attorneys who advertised would be subject to professional discipline — including disbarment for character adjudged une t for the practice of law. Although the promulgation of canons of ethics was not uncommon in an era when most professions were becoming more elite and self-regulated, only the legal profession subjected itself to an absolute ban on advertising. Thus, at the same time that doctors, educators, detectives and performers began to use the paid media extensively, lawyers felt it necessary to desist from advertising altogether. The ABA’ s decision to make all advertising unethical relates to cultural anxieties over a blurring of modernity’ s once distinct boundaries of public and private space, a blurring made increasingly unmanageable in Victorian-era society by the proliferation of lawyer advertising and divorce representations at the turn-of-the-century. In the nineteenth century, lawyers were represented as both public servants and masculinized men. 1 The duality of this representational strategy, referred to frequently in legal sources and literature as the “ lawyer‐ statesman,” 2 ree ects the cone ation of public space and masculine space that occurred with the advent of modernity. Characters represented as lawyer‐ statesmen generally possessed the type of masculine attributes that Bordo, 3 Keller 4 and others state were valued by the Enlightenment. These characteristics include a strict separation of public image from personal life, an emphasis on scientie c inquiry that favors reason over emotion, and a focus on truth as a universal constant. Thus, the ideal lawyer‐ statesman would be an emotionally detached, dispassionate, and rational individual who, either as an esteemed private lawyer or as a politician, dedicated himself to work on behalf of the public’ s interest.

Comments on Lawyer Advertising Papers

(2002). Comments on Lawyer Advertising Papers. Law & Literature: Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 207-227.

Attorney Advertising: The Link Between Ad Cues and Consumer Search Criteria

ABSTRACT Although the supreme court in 1978 broke the Bar Association's stranglehold on legal services marketing, there has been continuing resistance to the more visible marketing techniques, especially TV advertising. This study examined a select group of TV advertisements-all those ads submitted for competition in the 1992 and 1994 annual “Dignity in Lawyer Advertising” award programs, sponsored by the American Bar Association's Commission on Advertising.

Does Lawyer Advertising Adversely Influence the Image of Lawyers in the United States? An Alternative Perspective and New Empirical Evidence

Abstract Using multiple regression analysis, this study investigates the impact of lawyer advertising on the public's image of the law profession. The analysis, which includes variables to reflect per capita real outlays on lawyer advertising, the public's image of politicians, long‐term trends in the image of lawyers, the per capita number of lawyers, the per capita number of civil suits commenced in U.S. district courts, and the divorce rate, finds that lawyer advertising raises the public's esteem for the law profession. Moreover, causality tests supplementing the regression estimation reinforce this conclusion while revealing a bidirectional relationship between lawyer advertising and lawyer image.

Impact of lawyer advertising on the image of lawyers in the United States

The US Supreme Court in 1977 declared that most bans on lawyer advertising were unconstitutional. Since that decision, the volume of lawyer advertising has grown very rapidly. In addition, since the mid-1980s, Gallup polls indicate that the public's image of the law profession has declined substantially. Many members of the law profession casually conjecture that this decline is due to lawyer advertising. By contrast, this study offers a hypothesis that lawyer advertising should enhance the image of lawyers. In an effort to test this hypothesis, this study empirically investigates the impact of lawyer advertising on the image of the law profession. OLS results reveal that lawyer advertising may in fact elevate the image of lawyers in the USA.

Attitudes Toward the Advertising by Lawyers, Doctors, and CPA's

This California survey finds that consumers continue to have a more positive attitude toward the advertising of profes- sional services than the providers do. Furthermore, consumers tend to see greater value in CPA advertising than in lawyer or physician advertising. CPA's have a more positive attitude toward !heir adver- tising than physicians or lawyers, with the latter reflecting the most negative attitude.

Professionalism Reconsidered

Over the past few years, bar officials have increasingly called for a “rekindling” of lawyer professionalism. Perhaps the most forceful of these calls was sounded by former Chief Justice Warren Burger, in an oft-quoted speech he gave to the 1984 American Bar Association meeting in Las Vegas. There he chastised the profession for what he viewed as recent departures from “professional standards and traditions of the bar [which] in the past served to restrain members of the profession from practices and customs common and acceptable in the rough-and-tumble of the marketplace.” In particular, the former Chief Justice cited the absence until recently of lawyer advertising and solicitation, noting that “to those who still regard the practice of law as a profession of service-with high public obligations, rather than as a trade in the marketplace-the professional standards against advertising are still widely observed.” Although conceding that some developments in “higher lawyer visibility”, such as “store-front, street-level offices of so-called legal clinic" actually benefit the public, Burger nonetheless maintained that advertising and other commercial practices as well as a number of other abuses (such as an “excess of adversary zeal”) have resulted in a sharp decline in public confidence, as measured by some opinion polls.

Lawyer Advertising in England and the United States

Lawyer Advertising in England and the United States

The Impact, Regulation and Efficacy of Lawyer Advertising

The Impact, Regulation and Efficacy of Lawyer Advertising

Lawyer Advertising and the First Amendment

A current Supreme Court case concerning lawyer advertising, In re R.M.J., is analyzed in the context of a discussion of the diverse state regulations governing lawyer advertising and solicitation. The article considers the regulations in terms of their constitutionality, their tendency to impede effective advertising, and the effect they have on the legal profession's provision of information to potential clients about the nature, availability, and cost of legal services. Analysis of the major commercial speech cases, from Virginia State Board of Pharmacy to Central Hudson, indicates that many state rules infringe on attorneys' First Amendment rights.

Lawyer Advertising and the First Amendment

A current Supreme Court case concerning lawyer advertising, In re R.M.J., is analyzed in the context of a discussion of the diverse state regulations governing lawyer advertising and solicitation. The article considers the regulations in terms of their constitutionality, their tendency to impede effective advertising, and the effect they have on the legal profession's provision of information to potential clients about the nature, availability, and cost of legal services. Analysis of the major commercial speech cases, from Virginia State Board of Pharmacy to Central Hudson, indicates that many state rules infringe on attorneys' First Amendment rights.

Toward Improved Legal Service Delivery: A Look at Four Mechanisms

A legal service delivery system intended to facilitate the providing of services by private practitioners should, to be complete, include among its functions three that are of special importance. First, it should diagnose legal problems. Second, it should make available to a person with a legal problem the information needed for informed selection of a lawyer. And third, it should, when necessary, help the prospective client to make the initial contact with a lawyer. Lawyer advertising, specialty certification, lawyer directories, and lawyer referral services perform some of these functions, but no one mechanism performs all three adequately. A system combining the lawyer directory with an expanded lawyer referral service might do so and thus might be a more complete answer to the problem of delivery of legal services.

Advertising and the Price and Quality of Legal Services: The Case for Legal Clinics

Because the holding in Bates v. State Bar of Arizona is narrow and because some lawyers remain opposed to advertising, the dispute over lawyer advertising continues. Many who favor restricting advertising contend that it will not benefit consumers. They argue that prices must either rise to cover the cost of advertising or, if prices do fall, that quality must also drop.This article addresses itself to both charges. The first section is theoretical, demonstrating how advertising could lower the costs of producing legal services. Advertising increases the volume of services a lawyer can expect to sell. Greater volume, in turn, allows greater specialization in production, more effective use of systems management, and the substitution of paralegals and capital for lawyer inputs. The authors argue that each of these changes will lower costs, thereby lowering prices without necessarily reducing quality. The second section is empirical, comparing the prices and particularly the quality of services produced by a heavy advertiser, the Legal Clinic of Jacoby & Meyers, and the traditional firms in the Los Angeles market with which the clinic competes. Quality is defined both subjectively and objectively, and original data are presented indicating that the quality of service that the clinic supplies is at least equivalent, and on some measures better, than the quality of service that traditional firms provide.