IN THE NEWS: "Click or Crime?" Pullman Defends Three Attorneys Facing Disciplinary Charges

A legal Web site finds itself in hot water over the most common ad strategy on the Internet

“Click or Crime?” an article by Daniel Fisher in the November 30, 2009, issue of Forbes  looks at a related group of attorney disciplinary cases now pending before the Connecticut Statewide Grievance Committee.  Pullman & Comley attorneys David Atkins and Marcy Tench Stovall are defending three of the five Connecticut licensed attorneys currently facing a disciplinary charge in connection with their listings on an attorney marketing web site operated by Total Attorneys, Inc. of Chicago.   The cases are receiving national attention in both the law firm marketing and the attorney regulation worlds because Connecticut is the first state to prosecute individual attorneys for paying for Total Attorneys' website program - and therefore the first state to issue a decision on whether lawyer participation in a widely used type of interactive "performance based" website marketing complies with the Rules of Professional Conduct.

According to David Atkins, Fisher writes, “the state must prove that Total Attorneys ‘recommended’ specific lawyers to consumers, not just that it collected a fee for bringing the two together.”

To read the full article, click here: