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Kevin Lomax: “Why the law? Cut the shit, Dad! Why the lawyers? Why the law?”
- John Milton: “Because the law, my boy, puts us into everything. It’s the ultimate backstage pass. It’s the new priesthood, baby. Did you know there are more students in law school than lawyers walking the Earth?” – The Devil’s Advocate (Al Pacino as John Milton, Keanu Reeves as Kevin Lomax)
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Rare indeed is the lawyer without a healthy, nay — a super-sized ego. No matter if handsome, homely, gorgeous, ill-favored or just ordinary, rarer still is the advertisement, commercial or webpage without the pseudo powerful, omniscient and authoritative, even smiling counselor’s countenance.- Sure there are ethical rules concerning the use of hopefully better looking actors who portray attorneys in advertisements, but absent “a clear disclosure that the actor is not a member or employee of the firm or that the depiction is a dramatization,” than it is considered “misleading and deceptive.” So in fairness to lawyers who advertise, ‘they just gotta put their mugs in their ads!’
- Last April, I mentioned lawyer advertising parenthetically at “There’s no passing up a good body slam to make a point.” In that post, I also mentioned along with others, Georgia lawyer Jamie Casino as among “the commercially capering counselors who ought to at least have their own ‘Hall of Fame’ if for nothing else, the entertainment value they bring to the public.”
- Well kudos to Casino who made news on Sunday by bringing a lot of entertainment and even high production value with his local television commercial during the Super Bowl. It was a far cry from most lawyer TV commercials. And it must have cost Casino a considerable chunk of counselor’s change.
- Too bad those of us in the southwest didn’t get to see it during the game, especially as most of the much ballyhooed Super Bowl television ads were frankly, crap. But thanks to social, viral and even the more staid traditional media, the word got out. The super-sized lawyer ego is alive and well. And Casino’s is even healthier the most. No actor portrayals here, it was lawyer Jamie Casino in living color and while hardly, an Oscar-winning turn, it was a film clip at least worthy of ‘the best’ of ghost-riding Nicholas Cage on fire.
- But as I noted last time, there will be head-shaking dismay “for lawyers who see themselves as part of a noble profession — nay, who may be besotted with a self-image redolent of a rarefied priesthood, well those sacerdotal practitioners will always get their cassocks in a bunch over the audacious advertising antics of their earthier colleagues.” So here’s the same news again — to the pompous and full of themselves, the law isn’t an altar, last time I looked, the courtroom wasn’t a cathedral, and you aren’t priests.
- So give it a rest. And get a load of this intellectual property lawyer with a sense of humor.
- And here’s a link to the professorially serious side of the same lawyer.
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- Photo Credits: Fashion_Plate_Manteau_1823.jpg fashion plate from Costume Parisien, 1823, at Wikipedia Commons, public domain;”The Devil’s Advocate,” artistic interpretation by Bill Strain at Flickr via Creative Commons-license requiring attribution.
