Ben Cowgill & Legality of Comair 5191 Advertising

I recently read a great (series) of articles by Ben Cowgill that outline the fuzzy nature of the law when it comes to print advertising – never mind online advertising. The articles center around the recent, tragic crash of Comair flight 5191 near Lexington Kentucky. But the issue isn’t the cause of the crash or story of the victims, per se, it’s about the swarm of ads that came out in the wake of the crash.

In the same vein as a recent CaseDetails post, Cowgill explores local and national law firms’ advertisements placed shortly after the crash as well as how the Kentucky Advertising Commission is reacting to those ads. I’ll leave it to you to follow the links and read the articles in full, but the interesting thing is what Cowgill only begins to explore. Don’t get me wrong, the articles are excellent and exactly what they should be, but I’ve enjoyed pondering

1. how any commission could regulate the timing of (and levee penalties because of) search engine results appearing within any 30 day “no contact” period after a tragedy. There’s not only the issue of Google listing what it pleases, when it pleases but there’s the larger issue of the law’s non-address of the Internet as a different advertising medium than print. As a constantly-accessible medium, it simply cannot be restricted to the same kind of publish-then-consume model followed by print ads.
2. none of this even mentions paid online advertising through Overture’s system, Google AdWords and others. Now we’re talking about firms taking pro-active measures to reach out and attract clients from a tragedy. If this is against any Advertising Commission’s rules, won’t it be rather easy to scrape results and penalize accordingly? Not much ambiguity here, but very few case examples out there setting precedent.

As these matters are clarified, it will be interesting to see how lawyers are directed to conduct their legal advertising campaigns. In addition, we’ll see if any caviats are created to accommodate the Internet as both an active and passive advertising medium. We shall see.

[tags]legal advertising,comair 5191,online advertising[/tags]

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