Editor’s note: The following roundtable discussion of Missouri’s lawyer advertising rules took place at Hannegan’s Restaurant on March 4. The rules changes are in the hands of the Missouri Supreme Court. At press time, the court had yet to decide to approve or not approve the changes.

CONNAGHAN: I want to thank everybody for coming here today. Might as well just start off and ask, what are the major revisions that the committee came up with on the rule changes?

LEVISON: I think asking what the major revisions are is kind of, in some ways, in the eyes of the beholder depending on where you’re sitting. To me - I know this isn’t answering your question - but as a threshold, as a threshold, I would just think it’s worth pointing out that the committee took a look at lawyer advertising, and we took a pretty long look at it.

We weren’t in a hurry to suggest new rules, and in fact, we’re still not in a hurry. We’ve done our work; we’ve made our proposal. It’s at the Supreme Court, and I know they’re going to give it due consideration.

And it’s just a guess, but my guess is when one group does something, another group looks at it, they seldom say, OK. Everything’s perfect.

So, you know, I would guess they may have their own input on this, so we’re a ways away from the final product, I would think.

But we were trying - when you ask what’s major here - our first threshold was, let’s get the rules clear. Because we had a sense that the rules were not clear enough for the lawyers who practice every day and for the enforcement officials. So right off the bat we wanted to make these things clearer so that to the extent we had some rules, lawyers knew what standard they were going to be held to.

So I just think right off the bat that that’s an important issue to make it clear, that we worked on making the rules clear, and I think that’s a major thing right there. We tried to clearly distinguish between direct and indirect advertising, and we tried to really protect the public with some of the things we’ve done.

And again, I think there’ll be a lot of more give-and-take probably as we go forward. But Tom, you want to give some more specifics than I have?

CASEY: I’ll go through, if you want, and give you some specific changes that we made.

In Rule 7.1, which deals with communications concerning lawyers’ services, I have four principal changes that I think we made.

Under the proposed rule, results-obtained advertising refers to the type of thing where - seen in advertising - that I have achieved $14 million verdicts in my career, that sort of thing. We have a restriction on that type of advertising that requires a conspicuous disclosure that suggests that past results afford no guarantee on future results. Every case is different and must be judged on its own merits. That was very much of a compromise proposal.

There’s also in 7.1 a restriction on advertising for a specific type of case concerning which the lawyer has neither experience or competence. Hotly debated proposal. And we consciously did not attempt to define what is meant by neither experience nor competence.

It may speak for itself, but it goes to the situation where, for example, an individual will advertise for a medical malpractice cerebral palsy baby case, when, in fact, that individual is right out of law school, has never seen a malpractice case, has no experience with malpractice cases, no experience with that type of case. And that was perhaps the most controversial provision that was passed, and it was controversial because arguably any rookie lawyer right out of school by the virtue of the fact that he is licensed to practice law in the state of Missouri is capable of performing on any type of a case, however complex.

And I think the distinction is that we tried to make or is implicit here is the distinction that handling a matter about which you have little or no competency or experience is one thing, and advertising for such a case is another thing. And by advertising, implicitly you’re making a statement to the public about that.

Another change refers to a restriction on advertising lawyers who advertise for a particular type of case when it is their custom if they get certain a case to refer those matters out to other lawyers. And we say that you can’t do that without conspicuously identifying the fact that, If I get such a case, I’m going to refer it to another lawyer.