Law Firm Publishing & Ethics
FEMA holds a bogus press conference about the fires in California, and people are outraged. Across the country — from liberal living rooms to patriotic patios to real press conferences with real reporters — people are asking, “How dumb can these people continue to be AND STILL HAVE JOBS?”
Even more than large federal agencies, large law firms have to be sure they don’t find themselves in the news for some ethical lapse. That could be costly!
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In addition to lots of legal matter, large law firms publish lots of promotional materials: client alerts, newsletters, announcements, etc.
So, these firms have to consider the ethics of publishing. They have to consider things like:
1. Being accurate. The date a piece was published and the name(s) of its author(s) should appear at the top of the piece, along with the name of the firm.
If an associate writes the copy for a client alert, but a partner is credited as the author, and your firm’s name is on it, you’ve made a misrepresentation.
If you publish a client alert in May, and then update it in August to reflect some change in events, and you don’t change the date, you’ve made a misrepresentation.
If you publish an article and identify So-and-So as its author, then So-and-So must know of it. If I call So-and-So (e.g., one of your attorneys) and ask about the article, and So-and-So knows nothing of it — even though it was published just last week — then something’s not quite right.
2. Giving Credit. Add a copyright notice to by-lined articles.
If you publish something that belongs to another, don’t present it as your own (without consent).
If an attorney at your firm wrote some articles for a business journal (which holds the rights to those artices), you can’t republish those articles without permission.
If you gain an attorey from another firm, and the attorney wrote some articles for that firm, don’t republish them.
If a photo appears in your firm’s brochure, then you must have acquired rights to it. The people who produce your publications need to know about copyrights and permissions and works-for-hire. After all, they do work at a law firm!
3. Being Careful. Publishers have responsibilities, and it can be costly to treat them too lightly.
Some large law firms that publish lots of promotional materials like client alerts don’t regularly review what they publish. That’s playing with fire.
A publisher doesn’t act responsibly when it doesn’t review what it publishes.
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Imagine this: a marketing coordinator at a large firm makes a bad decision, which goes unchecked. She collects old law journal articles written by the firm’s attorneys. She compiles them and then republishes them all together in what looks like the firm’s own law journal. It looks great, but there’s a problem — she didn’t get permission from the original law journals to do this, and they’re complaining.
She made a mistake by not getting permission. She was young, and she didn’t know, but she works for a firm that claims it’s “the leader in protecting and enforcing intellectual property rights.”
The attorneys in the IP department didn’t know what the marketing department was doing. And so it just slipped by everyone.
What the outside world sees is that the firm has troubles keeping its own house in order, and might not be the world’s best source of advice.
