Back in my days of trying cases and teaching others how to do it, we had a requirement that if we could not articulate the entire case in a single sentence that our non-lawyer spouses would understand, we were not ready to go to trial. This came to mind the other day when I was telling my long-suffering wife about the recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions decision in the North Carolina dentist teeth-whitening case and what it might mean to lawyers, legal regulation, interstate legal practice and new market entrants such as Clerky, Legal OnRamp, AVVO, Lega Zoom and others. “Hmmm,” she said, as I described several of the new Internet services that offer legal, law-lite and law-like services to all comers, “sounds like the barely authorized practice of law.” Bingo!
For those many of you who do not follow this stuff too closely, the North Carolina case involved the state dental board, which had ruled that teeth whitening was the practice of dentistry and had gone to great lengths to drive the fast-growing retail teeth-whitening enterprises out of the malls and storefronts where they were making a good business. In response, the Federal Trade Commission had ruled that the dentists had violated the Sherman Anti-trust Act.
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