You Can Thank (or Blame) Richard M. Jacobs for the Ads Populating Your TV!
When I graduated from law school, attorneys could not advertise. One had to rely on social networks (not social media!) family and existing clients to get business.
That has changed as anyone watching TV knows. Legal ads seem to outnumber those for drugs (including ED treatments) life insurance, car insurance, St. Jude’s Hospital (which must spend half of its income on ads) and just about anything else.
The change began when John Bates and Van Osteen, new lawyers, formed a legal clinic in 1974, in order to "provide legal services at modest fees to persons of moderate income who did not qualify for governmental legal aid."
They accepted only "routine matters, such as uncontested divorces, uncontested adoptions, simple personal bankruptcies, and changes of name." They kept costs down "by extensive use of paralegals, automatic typewriting equipment (word processors?) and forms.”
Two years into the practice they realized that their clinical concept would not survive without advertising. They decided to test the constitutionality of the Arizona prohibitions against legal advertising by running a newspaper ad:
Do you need a lawyer?
Legal services at very reasonable fees
· Divorce or legal separation — uncontested (both spouses sign papers) $175.00 plus $20.00 court filing fee
· Preparation of all court papers and instructions on how to do your own simple uncontested divorce $100.00
· Adoption — uncontested severance proceeding $225.00 plus approximately $10.00 publication cost
· Bankruptcy — non-business, no contested proceedings
o Individual $250.00 plus $55.00 court filing fee.
o Wife and Husband $300.00 plus $110.00 court filing fee.
· Change of Name $95.00 plus $20.00 court filing fee
The Arizona Bar took exception, and the case made it up to the United States Supreme Court where the Court ruled that Arizona's total ban on lawyer advertising violated the free speech guarantee of the First Amendment.
But that did not mean that states were powerless to regulate lawyer advertising at all. The Supreme Court reiterated that states were still permitted to ban false, deceptive, or misleading advertising by lawyers; to regulate the manner in which lawyers may solicit business in person; to require warnings and disclaimers on lawyer advertising …”
The Missouri Supreme Court, reacting to the Bates decision limited advertising to 10 generic categories of information including name, address, and telephone number, areas of practice
Attorney Richard M. Jacobs, a sole practitioner, buoyed by the Bates decision, started advertisements which went beyond those guidelines. His case In Re RMJ made it to the US Supreme Court which unanimously overturned the Missouri rules, essentially holding that unless a lawyer’s ads were misleading, they were ok.
So you have Mr. Jacobs to thank for taking the Bates decision to the point where it really meant something. While the ads can be annoying, at least in some routine areas, they have made legal services more affordable to the general public.
Unfortunately for Mr. Jacobs his fifteen minutes of fame were a brief shining moment and he was named in the Supreme Court only by his initials (because it was a disciplinary matter in the Missouri courts) and was represented by a law professor.
He had a difficult career otherwise. He was sued several times and had other bar complaints filed against him. He eventually surrendered his law license in 1983 when he was about to be disbarred. He tried unsuccessfully to have it reinstated several times but passed away in 2016. My guess is that most people who ran into him in St. Louis didn’t have a good feeling about him, however, he probably helped more working class people that most attorneys in this state.