South Carolina Supreme Court broadens but also restricts lawyers’ advertisement.
By order of August 22, 2011, the SC Supreme Court amended the South Carolina Rules of Professional Conduct and Rule 407 of the South Carolina Appellate Court Rules (SCACR).
Declining to adopt the majority of the changes proposed by the South Carolina Bar’s Commission on Lawyer Advertising, the Court has accepted some of the proposed amendments to Rules 7.1, 7.2 and 7.3 of the South Carolina Rules of Professional Conduct, and to Rule 407, SCACR. The intervention of the Court has broadened the ability of lawyers to advertise on one side but, on the other side, has also introduced some hurdles that did not exist before.
In particular, the Court loosened the regulation by deleting the term “unfair” from Rule 7.1 and the ban on testimonials from Rule 7.1(d) (replaced with language allowing testimonials under certain conditions). Another simplification is the elimination in Rule 7.3(c) of the requirement that solicitations be filed with the Commission on Lawyer Conduct, together with a $50 filing fee.
On the other side, the Court heightened the requirements for permissible advertisement by amending Rule 7.2(a) to provide that:
“all advertisements shall be predominately informational such that, in both quantity and quality, the communication of factual information rationally related to the need for and selection of a lawyer predominates and the communication includes only a minimal amount of content designed to attract attention to and create interest in the communication.”
In addition, on the side of the increased obligations, you might want to consider both the addition in Rule 7.3 of electronic solicitations to the types of solicitations for which lawyers must maintain a file, and the amendment in Rule 7.3(d)(1) to require that email solicitations be labeled as advertising material in the subject line and at the beginning and end of the message in capital letters and prominent type. While the above are not a complete list of the amendments, they are for sure the most important from the order.
The full text is available at http://www.sccourts.org…