Lawyers Do More Than Advertisements Suggest

If you look under attorneys in the Los Angeles phone book, you will find 96 pages of advertisements. Since 1977, when an Arizona law firm successfully challenged rules against lawyer advertising, lawyers have been using phone books, newspapers, and television to advertise their services. In fact, within days after the Supreme Court decision on June 28, 1977, there were two full pages of lawyer ads in the Los Angeles Times.

Before 1908, advertising by lawyers was also permissible; Abraham Lincoln listed his services in a published directory.

But ads do not tell the full story about lawyering. If you look in the phone book, you will think that legal work is limited to such fields as personal injury, divorce, workers’ compensation, immigration and malpractice. The ads often deal with the work that lawyers do in court. But lawyers do a lot of other things that are rarely mentioned in such ads.

Lawyers help clients start businesses by forming corporations or partnerships, advise tenants about their rights, write leases for landlords, help clients buy and sell land and draft contracts of all sorts.

They advise couples on prenuptial agreements. They prepare wills and develop compliance programs for businesses. They lobby legislators and counsel large corporations about how to deal with their employees.

Lawyer advertising adds to the public perception, fueled by years of “Perry Mason” and “L.A. Law,” that lawyers are primarily courtroom combatants.

The great French cartoonist, Honore Daumier, in the mid-19th Century, drew several unflattering caricatures of lawyers. Each one showed the lawyer as a litigator. A British cartoon shows a cow, with one litigant yanking at its tail and the other one pulling the head. A lawyer sits in the middle, milking the cow.

Although many lawyers milk the cow of litigation, so to speak, the perception of lawyers as constant courtroom battlers is far from the truth. As far back as 1975, one judge observed in a legal journal that “less than one-fourth of the lawyers in practice devote a majority of their time to litigation.”

Edward A. Dauer, former dean and now professor of law at Denver University, said it in these words: “The fact, of course, is that many lawyers--maybe even most lawyers--have always spent more of their time guiding their clients around legal risks than protecting them in court once the risks have materialized.”

What the public thinks of lawyers is a subject of considerable concern to the legal profession. In almost every bar association, from the big American Bar Assn. on down, there is a public relations committee, formed to help improve the image of lawyers.

One approach those committees might take is simply to explain to the public what is involved in the lawyering process, and how consumers can best use lawyers--outside of the courtroom.