New ad rules promise change for legal profession

David Clark of the State Bar of Nevada ticks through a long list of things the organization is doing everything from preparing magazine articles to hiring more staff as it gears up for sweeping changes in the rules that regulate advertising by lawyers.

The rules, which will be overseen by the state bar, take effect Sept. 1. They were approved in late April by the Nevada Supreme Court, which wants to protect the image of the legal profession while it also makes sure that advertising isn't misleading.

For consumers, the new rules mean they'll be seeing some things pictures of accident scenes, for instance that previously were forbidden in attorney's advertising.

And the new rules allow lawyer's advertising to carry testimonials and endorsements, so long as disclaimers provide some balance to the claims.

But the biggest change will come behind the scenes as the state bar develops deep new systems to oversee lawyers' advertising. Law firms and their advertising agencies also are shifting their timelines and workflow to address the new rules.

Under the new system, law firms either are required to file copies of advertising with the state bar within 15 days after the ad runs.

A 10-member committee of northern Nevada attorneys will review ads that have run in this region, and the committee has the power to order that ads be pulled. A similar group will work with advertising in southern Nevada.

As an alternative, attorneys and their ad agencies can submit ads in advance for review by the bar association.

Supreme Court Justice James Hardesty, who worked closely with the bar association on the new rules, said many ads currently aren't seen at all by state bar officials.

"This was a rule intended to strengthen the state bar's ability to track ads and enforce the rules," Hardesty said when the new plan was rolled out.

And the justice noted the new rules seek only to crack down on false or misleading advertising. The Supreme Court has given up on attempts to regulate ads that are in bad taste, figuring there's no way to do that without stepping on the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech.

A 19-member Study Committee on Lawyer Advertising spent more than two years hammering out the new rules, and it identified misleading statements as one of the most serious concerns in lawyer advertising.

Clark, who serves as assistant bar counsel in the State Bar of Nevada, said the rules are modeled on a similar program that's been successful in Texas.

But getting them in place has been a chore for the bar association.

Among the tasks to be completed, Clark said, is organization of the teams of volunteers to review ads in both ends of the state, preparation of articles for the bar association's magazine, fine-tuning the operating rules and hiring a fulltime paralegal to oversee the review process.

And the bar association's phone has been ringing, often with questions about a requirement that every attorney in the state even those that don't advertise file a biographical statement.

Because attorney advertising typically doesn't detail a lawyer's background, the biographical sheets maintained by the state bar will be available to provide that information to clients.

Among the attorneys required to file the biographical statements are judges, who presumably never will advertise their services.

Constance Akridge of statewide law firm Jones Vargas says her firm doesn't expect much change from the new rules.

"Our advertising is pretty tame," she says. And tombstone ads those gray blocks of type that simply make announcements on behalf of business-oriented law firms are exempted from the new rules.

Pat Lundvall, a Reno-based partner in McDonald, Carano, Wilson LLP, notes that the firm's marketing efforts range from newspaper advertising to nontraditional venues such as underwriting of programming on public radio stations.

"I'm hoping that this process is going to be automatic," she says. "We don't believe it's going to be onerous."

Diane Gibes, who heads marketing for the law firm of Kummer Kaempher Bonner Renshaw & Ferrario, says she's been putting plenty of thought into compliance even though she doesn't expect any big changes.

She's looking, for instance, at ads the firm ran in the past to make sure they'd meet the new standard if resurrected. She's made sure the company's ad agency understands the new rules, and the firm's in-house general counsel has been assigned to review ads to make sure they comply.

The biggest change, Gibes says, is the additional time needed to move an ad through the review process between the time it's created and the time it's scheduled to run. In some instance, she says, the process could be extended by several weeks.