News Flash: NJ puts "Superlawyers" ban on hold
This just in: the New Jersey Supreme Court stayed the decision banning lawyers to advertise themselves as "Super Lawers" and "Best Lawyers," based upon appeal filed by N.J. Super Lawyers organization. For background see NJ Stupidly Outlaws "Super Lawyers" and "Best Lawyers."
Justice John Wallace Jr. issued the stay at the request of Super Lawyers Magazine's management and the State Bar Association, after the Committee on Attorney Advertising in Opinion 39 banned lawyers from advertising in Super Lawyers and Best Lawyers publications.
Wallace's decision "has taken us back to the status quo before Opinion 39," Bennett Wasserman of Newark's Stryker, Tams & Dill, one of the Super Lawyers counsel in the case, told Law.com.
State Bar President Wayne Positan says lawyers didn't know what to do: pull ads, take Super Lawyer plaques off their walls, reconfigure letterheads and Web sites at great expense or do nothing and risk disciplinary action.
The opinion, which had taken effect upon publication on July 24 [185 N.J.L.J. 360] affected Best Lawyers' 744 New Jersey selectees and Super Lawyers' 1,669. They couldn't advertise their inclusion in the services' lists or participate in the selection processes, under Opinion 39.
The opinion stated that promoting a lawyer's selection as a Super Lawyer or a Best Lawyer in America violates ethics rules against misleading advertising by creating an unjustified expectation about results the lawyer could achieve, the opinion stated.
Super Lawyers magazines appear in 22 states. "This Opinion's adverse effects on the Bar have been immediate and widespread," says the petition by six New Jersey attorneys listed as Super Lawyers and by Super Lawyers' parent company, Key Professional Media of Minneapolis.
"An entire publication has been shut down and scores of New Jersey attorneys that previously used their Super Lawyers selection to promote their practices can no longer do so," according to the petition, prepared by Wasserman and John Gibbons of Newark's Gibbons, Del Deo, Dolan, Griffinger & Vecchione.
As I predicted, law firms in New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Oregon and Minnesota have withdrawn, withheld or suspended commitments for advertising and attorneys in Missouri and Tennessee have asked to be dropped from inclusion on the list.
In a July 21 letter to the advertising committee, Positan wrote that firms with expensive ad campaigns are "now facing the prospect of trashing brochures and other materials, and having them redone minus any 'Super Lawyer/Best Lawyer' designation."
He noted that there was no warning to lawyers about propriety of such advertising and that he was not aware of any state with similar restrictions. "That being the case, it seems unfair that lawyers should now face considerable uncertainty and suffer financial loss before the process of reviewing the opinion has even commenced," Positan wrote.
Having won the stay, advocates of the rating systems can now concentrate on trying to get the Supreme Court to reverse the opinion.
