Firm Wins Temporary TV Ad Ban

The Legal Rights Defenders, the personal-injury referral service with the seemingly ubiquitous radio and television ads aimed at victims of traffic accidents, was awarded a court order Friday that bans the TV commercials of a competitor.

David Ganezar, a Santa Monica-based personal injury attorney, said he was informed by the office of Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Robert H. O’Brian that a 20-day restraining order had been granted on the grounds that his commercials defame the activities of the Legal Rights Defenders.

Ganezar said that his ads, which have been airing on several local broadcast and cable channels since February, were likely to be pulled from the air as soon as local television stations received a copy of the order Friday.

“Even though we are talking about paid commercial speech, to me the First Amendment is at issue here,” Ganezar said. “I have a right to stand up and tell the public that Legal Rights Defenders is a referral service and not an actual law firm. If they don’t like it, they are supposed to prove their damages and sue me for money, not narrow the marketplace of ideas and restrict the flow of information to the public.”

In his ads, Ganezar says that the Legal Rights Defenders “sells your case to an attorney. Any attorney who has the money to buy it. He passes the cost on to you.” The screen meanwhile shows a pair of hands counting out a stack of hundred dollar bills and then shows the logo of Legal Rights Defenders inside a circle with a red slash through it.

While it is true that Legal Rights Defenders refers cases to a vast network of attorneys who each pay a fee for the referral, Legal Rights Defenders’ lawyers argued that the visuals in Ganezar’s ads falsely implied that there is something seedy, perhaps even illegal about what they do.

Earlier this year, both KCBS-TV Channel 2 and KTTV-TV Channel 11 had pulled Ganezar’s ads after receiving complaints from Legal Rights Defenders, but Ganezar subsequently was able to persuade both stations to continue to run them.

A hearing on a permanent injunction against Ganezar’s ads is set for Dec. 24.