A pox on your house
Thirty-two years ago this month, as a recent law grad, I was studying for the California Bar exam.
One section of the exam which we took earlier pertained to ethics. Although there were a few curveballs on legal ethics, when taking the ethics multi-choice test I followed my rule that if something sounded bad or unprofessional it probably was unethical. In other words, err on the side of being safe and be guided by how a professional should act.
Imagine a hypothetical question in 1982, a pretty far fetched one, where there was digital mail by which you received and sent digital messages on a device you carried in your pocket or purse, which device you also used as a phone. You received and sent serious personal messages and professional business messages making this digital mail thing not only worth your while, but essential.
Some lawyers, in an effort to cheaply get their name and contact information in front of you, flooded your digital mail with advertising messages couched as legal information. The lawyers didn’t ask if you wanted their messages, they just sent them. Only if you contacted them and said “No more of this junk” did they stop sending the messages. You see, they could get fined $16,000 by the FTC if they didn’t stop.
The term “spam” began to be used to describe sending these unsolicited bulk messages, especially advertising, indiscriminately. Such lawyers liked “spamming,” as it was so economical — they had no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists, and it was difficult to hold them accountable for their mass mailings.
Because the barrier to entry was so low, spammers like these lawyers, became numerous. The volume of this unsolicited mail became so high that the services handling the digital messages had to increase their charges to everyone and laws governing the use of spam had to be passed.
1982 Bar Questions: Is this spamming by lawyers unethical? Yes. Should a lawyer be suspended from practice for spamming? Yes.
These answers would be no brainers in 1982. Heck, no lawyer would think of pulling such crap.
Fast forward to today. My email box gets flooded every day with emails and ads being sent to a list I did not subscribe to. I skim through hundreds of emails just to delete the junk. I’m sad to say a lot of such emails come from law firms and services on their behalf.
Why? Because it’s legal and the bar for what we accept from lawyers hawking their services has been set so low.
For you lawyers and law firms who think what you’re doing is okay. It’s not. It’s spam and it’s unprofessional.
Not spam? This from About.com on opt-out email:
Definition: Opt-out email marketing assumes a general permission to send marketing messages to everyone who has not explicitly stated that they do not want to receive such information. Spammers operate on this highly problematic premis. Opt-in email marketing, where messages are only sent to those who request them, is much more effective.
Think of opt-out marketing as a never-ending chain of mailing list that you are automatically subscribed to. While you can unsubscribe (“opt out of”) each list individually, it won’t be long before a new list emerges, and of course you’re automatically subscribed.
Also Known As: Spam (emphasis added)
For those lawyers who don’t go back to the time before spam, when sending unsolicited messages each week or month would be unheard of, I’ll never talk you out of spamming. I can ask “How do you live with yourselves?”
And I can wish a pox on your house.