Court battle over legal advertising looms
STARING DOWN a challenge that it has breached the constitutional rights of Vaughn Bignall of Bignall Law, the General Legal Council (GLC) has welcomed a lawsuit to determine whether attorneys can lawfully advertise their services.
As the Supreme Court prepares to weigh the case, Allan S. Wood, QC, chairman of the GLC, says the oversight body believes that “it cannot be a free-for-all”.
“Now that we have social media, it is particularly important that we have orderly regulation of advertising and content that goes out to the public,” Wood told The Gleaner yesterday.
The GLC chairman said that he was surprised that an attempt was being made to attack the rules governing the profession as being unconstitutional.
“We are awaiting service (of the claim), and our team is ready to deal with the matter. We will have this issue determined once and for all,” he declared.
Bignall, who practises in the area of personal injury and fatal-accident claims, has also named the attorney general, in her capacity as the Government’s chief legal adviser, as the second defendant in the matter.
The attorney, who is represented by Lemar Neil, is seeking a declaration by the court that the decision of the GLC, issued on September 26, 2018, “abrogates, abridges, or infringes the claimant’s rights as guaranteed by Section 16(2) of the Charter [of Fundamentals Rights and Freedoms]”.
He also wants the courts to issue an order quashing the September 26, 2018, decision of the GLC “as being null and void and of no legal effect”.
BREACHED CANONS
In its annual report for the period April 2018 to March 2019, the GLC indicated that it had written to 11 attorneys-at-law advising them that their websites, advertisements in the Yellow Pages, and on the Internet were in breach of the canons of the legal profession.
The GLC said that Bignall Law circulated an advertisement over the Christmas season in 2018, which was in breach of an order made by the watchdog on September 26, 2018, in that the law firm failed to first get the approval of the GLC before releasing the advertisement.
Bignall is also seeking an injunction restraining the GLC from commencing or continuing any disciplinary proceedings against him.
In a Gleaner interview yesterday, Wood argued that to have an orderly profession, it was necessary for the GLC to regulate the conduct of attorneys advertising.
“It is necessary both to protect the public and to protect the good reputation and character of the profession,” he said.
He maintained that there must be some oversight of the profession, noting that the GLC was entrusted with that mandate.
“We have to protect the public, and if advertising is left for a freefor-all, particularly when attorneys can exercise a certain amount of undue influence ... they wield with the public, it is necessary to regulate it in a proper and orderly way,” he asserted.
“I don’t consider that we have breached anybody’s constitutional rights, and the constitution itself says you have to balance the rights of the individual with the interest of the public and protect the public at large, and I think the General Legal Council has struck the correct balance,” he reasoned.
Attempts to get a comment from Neil, Bignall’s attorney, were unsuccessful as his phone rang without answer.
Bignall, in his affidavit, said that the attorney general was made a party to the lawsuit since Parliament delegated its legislative responsibility to the GLC and “facilitated the promulgation of the impugned Advertising Regulations. The second defendant is also joined as the representative of the Crown pursuant to the Crown Proceedings Act”.