Appellate Law

Advertising Rules and Social Media: Texas Style

By D. Todd Smith

The second article in my Texas Lawyer series on technology issues and law practice appears in this week's issue and has been republished here through Law.com.  For this installment, I look at the Advertising Review Department's new Internal Interpretive Comment 17, which addresses the interplay between Part VII of the Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct (the advertising and solicitation rules) and websites, blogs, social media, and web-based display ads.

In the end, I conclude that Comment 17 doesn't change much about the way Texas lawyers should approach these issues.  Blogs and social media are just new ways of communicating.  Regardless of the medium, we are each responsible for what we say.

Information about how the State Bar views these issues is available in an article that Advertising Review director Gene Major published in the new Texas Bar Journal.  In his piece, Gene encourages lawyers to blog and use social media to promote their practices.  He also provides some specific instructions on how to do so within the ethical rules.

Full post as published by Texas Appellate Law Blog on July 12, 2010 (boomark / email).