David Hudson at the ABA Journal covers the victory in Rubenstein v. The Florida Bar.
The case reflects the Florida Bar’s long-standing ambivalence toward lawyer advertising, which the U.S. Supreme Court held in its 1977 ruling in Bates v. State Bar of Arizona to be commercial speech entitled to protection under the First Amendment. Since then, Florida has maintained one of the strictest regimes for regulating lawyer advertising of any state in the country. In recent years, for instance, Florida was the only state with an outright prohibition against lawyers including information about past results in their advertising. Other states generally followed the lead of the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct, which impose no blanket restrictions on references to past results, although six states (Missouri, New Mexico, New York, South Dakota, Texas and Virginia) require references to past results to be accompanied by a disclaimer.
Greg Beck 