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Chicken Little and Blogging Ethics
Don't look now, but the sky is falling on lawyers who blog. It happened once before -- a decade ago when lawyers first began to publish legal information on the Web -- and it is happening again now with the spread of legal blogs, says Kevin O'Keefe at LexBlog Blog:
"It's this Chicken Little mentality and the discussion generated from it that is attracting news coverage on the ethics and lawyer blogs debate. Covering a story that no one in the their right mind could believe (lawyer ethics rules preventing lawyers from sharing helpful information with the public?) is highly entertaining. And of course plays into all the articles which cast lawyers and our profession in bad light."
Lawyers, says O'Keefe, "are foolishly getting sucked into a discussion of whether lawyer blogs should be regulated as lawyer advertising." He points to a Chicago Tribune article this week, Lawyers Face Right to Blog, as the latest example.
"The article provides a nice discussion on the ethics of blogging and possible restraints quoting lawyers from around the country, including myself. But rather than jump into such a discussion, why not just recognize that this discussion itself is nuts."
The last thing lawyers need, O'Keefe suggests, are ethics rules governing blogs written by lawyers and judges who know nothing about them. More to the point, blogs are here to stay, and no ethics body can change that, he says. "Any lawyer who fears they may is screaming the sky is falling."
Posted by Robert J. Ambrogi on November 8, 2006 at 04:18 PM | Permalink
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