Ambulance Chasing

How many times have we heard the term ambulance chasing and thought of lawyers who were unscrupulous and had no ethics?

Just yesterday I critiqued an attorney video where a lawyer was seeking accident victims while shooting her video in an operating room. What made the video even more unusual is that there appeared to be a real patient on the operating room table, a physician operating, and a nurse attending to the patient. Unlike a video that depicts a hospital in the background, this medical malpractice attorney was clearly and visibly located within the operating room itself. Whether the people in the operating room were actors or not I could not tell.

However, this brief video did nothing to educate an injured victim who was searching for an attorney online. It is this type of advertising that gave rise to the term of ambulance chaser for negligence and medical malpractice attorneys years ago. Typically, lawyers had a very limited means in which to educate consumers about which lawyer was the right one for them. Traditional forms of advertising consisted of television advertisements lasting no more than 30 seconds, and a Yellow Pages ad that contained very little useful information.

Comedians routinely spoofed lawyer advertisements and movies portrayed negligence lawyers hanging out in funeral homes, (The Verdict with Paul Newman), as being the only way they could find cases. Other lawyers were shown hanging out in emergency rooms seeking to sign up every available accident victim.

Although every spoof has a hint of truth to it, it is highly unusual for attorneys nowadays to be found lurking in hospital emergency rooms or chasing ambulances to track down injured victims. 

The other day while in court I ran into a defense attorney I worked with on a number of cases. He was on my mailing list to receive my monthly newsletter. I hadn't seen him in a few years, but the first thing he said to me when we saw each other was "I still get your newsletter." The comment he made after that prompted me to write this blog post. He said, "Your newsletter appears to be a bit of ambulance chasing, doesn't it?" I asked him what he meant by that.

He said, "I recognize that attorneys have to have their shtick as a way of getting potential clients." I replied that my newsletter was not only informative, but helped educate potential clients, friends, colleagues and injured victims about how the legal process works. Importantly, I told him that there are people who have not received my newsletter on time who call me up wanting to know why their newsletters are late because they enjoy it so much.

Contained within my informative newsletter I have a trivia game, interesting news items, one or two stories about law, and in many cases an ongoing story called "Gerry's Never Ending (fictional) Story."  When I returned back to my office later that day, I removed this defense attorney from my mailing list recognizing that he truly didn't understand the purpose of the newsletter. Clearly, I never want to send my newsletter to someone who doesn't want it. I will tell you that in all the years I've publish my newsletter, this is only the second person I've removed my mailing list.