Market Elsewhere. This Means You (Update)
Simple Justice:
Yesterday saw an influx of comments by people who have never contributed an iota of substance to Simple Justice before, but suddenly appeared to offer their thoughts on the subject of lawyer marketing. Without repeating the details of my position, I am strongly antagonistic to active marketing by lawyers.
Not surprisingly, two groups rallied against me, lawyers who market and those whose incomes depend on lawyers who market. They were offended by the vehemence of my attack on a person who posted a comment attacking lawyers who do not believe that blatant self-promotion maintains level of the dignity and professionalism that lawyers should reflect, calling such lawyers “elitists” who still think of lawyers as some “medieval guild.” Idea like this are, in my view, not merely fundamentally wrong, but the root of many of the problems that have undermined the legal profession.
Obviously, others disagree with me. That’s fine, but that’s not the end of the problem.
The reason Simple Justice exists is so that I have a forum to express my thoughts on whatever issue catches my interest. In other words, it is my home. Others do not have a “right” to come to my home and express their ideas on equal footing. They can say what they want on their blogs. They can say what they want on a blog where the owner allows them. They have no right to do so here.
What compels me to state the obvious is that some commenters devolved from the silly, the arguments in favor of lawyer marketing, to the ridiculous, asserting not merely a right to express themselves but a proprietary right in their comments, including the right to link to themselves in order to drive traffic to their own websites. This comes from people who do not seek to contribute…