Should the state bars regulate law blogs as advertisements? You might think that advocates of blog regulation would classify blogging as a form of advertising, but they don’t urge this classification, one reason being that the main target of their regulatory ambitions is the authorship of blog postings, whereas nobody contends law firms must write their own ads.
The criticisms of ghost blogging conceive of a law blog as showcasing the attorney’s knowledge, the reverse of the concerns about ads. The ABA Model Code of Professional Responsibility EC 2-10 directs attorneys to avoid “undue emphasis upon style and advertising stratagems which serve to hinder rather than to facilitate intelligent selection of counsel,” but as described by ghost-blogging opponents, blogging is an advertising stratagem involving a sophisticated form of bragging. “Our knowledge is our stock in trade. If you believe that I know more because you read it on my blog and I, in fact, did not write that blog, I am deceiving you.” (Legal Ethics Forum, Comment by Charles M. Rowland II.)
The fear ghost blogging’s opponents harbor is that attorneys lacking knowledge of an area of law will deceive clients about their lawyerly competence. While various obvious measures could prevent such deceit, to see this as a significant threat is to misapprehend the state of the legal market. There simply aren’t many, if any, professional bloggers with the legal knowledge that would impress clients, yet with the willingness to work for the pittance a law firm pays a blogger.
Deceit about authorship is obviously unethical, and whether any instance of ghost blogging is deceitful is a question of fact; this much is platitudinous. The interesting question is why the ghost-blogging opponents worry about what’s so unlikely: what do they really fear? Not that bloggers will embellish the limited skills of some attorneys, but that attorneys who blog—as ghost-blogging’s opponents often do—won’t receive the recognition due them. They don’t want clients saying, “That sounds good, but everyone knows an attorney never authors his own blog.” They don’t want their blogs discounted as signals of their competence. Although law-competent ghost blogging is a chimera, a cynical public is receptive to that meme.
Regulatory support for authentic attorney blogging is a good idea, since allowing the public to rely on a signed blog as a sort of work sample would be a positive development for the profession. But the profession must confront two problems. The first concerns the definition of advertising, which the Model Code doesn’t define and the California Rules of Professional Conduct defines as communication “primarily directed to seeking professional employment primarily for pecuniary gain transmitted to the general public ….” (Rule 1-400(F)(12).) Under this definition, a blog is probably an advertisement, and law-bloggers’ subtle sales pitch is, strictly speaking, illegal—due to its being a style-based advertising strategy—under the Model Code's persuasive authority.
Until the legitimacy of blogs is officially recognized, the law menaces blogging attorneys. Ghost-blogging opponent and prominent member of the “respondents’ bar” David Cameron Carr states, “So far California's discipline system is focusing its limited resources on more egregious misrepresentations than ghost blogging.” Measures that would favorably shape the profession are never a high state-bar priority, and ghost-blogging issues are bound to be especially low priority, since ambiguity enhances the state-bar’s power.
The second problem the profession must confront is the over-reaching of blogging attorneys, who are too ready to overkill by banning ghost blogging, deceptive or not, to improve their competitive position.
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