November 10, 2014
Social media websites allow anyone — or more accurately everyone — to communicate and share ideas and opinions with a wide-ranging audience. Websites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn provide an extraordinary means for professional and personal networking and self-promotion, and for researching personal and professional contacts. In previous blog posts, I addressed ethical perils for lawyers who access social media websites to research potential jurors and for lawyers who advise clients concerning the propriety of removing potentially incriminating and discoverable material from social media websites. This post addresses yet another category of ethical pitfalls for lawyers who use social media: The risk of violating the ethical rules that govern attorney advertising by using social media for professional self-promotion. [...]