Lawyers and law firms are increasingly using blogs, also referred to as “blawgs,” along with social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, to build their visibility and brand. While blogs do not have the traditional look and feel of attorney advertising, they certainly have at least some measure of commercial purpose. After all, it is unlikely that law firms would expend resources on this new form of communication if they did not at least hope to receive some return on their investment. Yet, blogs may not fit neatly inside regulations on attorney advertising that were written with more traditional media formats in mind. A recent Virginia Supreme Court case helped shed some light on when and how state bar organizations can regulate the content of attorney blogs. The case is available at Hunter v. Virginia State Bar, No. 121472 (Va. Feb. 28, 2013).
Horace Hunter of Hunter & Lipton maintained a non-interactive blog titled This Week in Richmond Criminal Defense, on which he posted discussions of numerous legal issues. The overwhelming majority of his posts, however, were narratives about cases in which Hunter had received favorable results for his clients. Neither the blog home page nor any individual post contained a disclaimer stating that case results depend on a variety of factors unique to each case, as required in attorney advertising by Virginia State Bar Rule of Professional Conduct 7.2.
