Since the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment allows lawyers to advertise in a manner that is not misleading to members of the general public, the authorities that regulate attorneys have struggled to devise rules to govern lawyer advertising without running afoul of the decision in Bates v. State Bar of Arizona, 433 U.S. 350 (1977).
Regardless, all of the rules regulating lawyer advertising remain based on one concept embodied in Model Rule of Professional Conduct 7.1 that “a lawyer shall not make a false or misleading communication about the lawyer or the lawyer’s services. A communication is false or misleading if it contains a material misrepresentation of fact or law, or omits a fact necessary to make the statement considered as a whole not materially misleading.” While the premise is admirable, numerous law firms ignore this basic tenet in their advertising and do so with impunity.
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