Unsolicited email is beginning to arrive in people’s inboxes soliciting clients to sue over the Glaxo SmithKline diabetes drug, Avandia. Bill Childs has more, as does Eric Turkewitz, who observes that no law firm is named in the ad, and proposes a course of action:
Figuring out which law firms have hired the spammer should be easy for an enterprising citizen-journalist, simply by filling out the form at the website that TortsProf linked to and waiting to see who calls or emails in response. Then publish the names online for the world to see.
Things might not be that simple, however. As earlier cases of spam of this sort indicate, such emails are typically sent by a middleman who assembles “leads” and then offers them for sale to actual law firms. The middleman, not being a lawyer, will claim not to be bound by bar rules against solicitation, while the law firms that buy the leads (if confronted on the matter) may or may not disclaim any knowledge of how the leads were generated. They’ll probably deny having hired an agent with instructions to send spam; but if someone happened to run a spam campaign just before selling them names, well, that’s not their doing, is it? So the New York bar-ethics rules are circumvented in perfect safety by all concerned, or so it would seem. Earlier: Jan. 8, 2006, Jan. 5, 2005, Mar. 29-31, 2002.
One Comment
I got a similar spam message for that Avamdia matter as well as “Have You Got A Personal Injury Suit?” spam, which I forwarded to the ethics link on the ABA page. They advised me that they are a voluntary organization and that if I have a complaint with the attorney sending me the spam, I would need to take it up with his local Bar Association.