Scenario:

Your law firm just successfully litigated against a pharmaceutical company. Your client used one of the company's drugs and suffered horrible side effects. The jury awarded your client a substantial sum for their injuries. One of your colleagues at the law office thinks this is a great way to market the firm and presents the following to your supervising attorney:

"The Law Offices of Smith and Lawson SPECIALIZE IN PHARMACEUTICAL CASES! Recently, our firm won a $5 million judgment against the manufacturer of a drug company for producing an unsafe drug. We can win for you tooplease call us if you would like us to represent your interests."

Your supervising attorney asks you for your comment. How do you respond? Please be sure to reference the critical ethical rules as well as rules related to advertising for the legal profession.

My response given:

Endorsement of the law firm in a way that the confidentiality of an individual or anything related to a client being compromised should be refrained and is prohibited. As a lawyer, one is responsible to protect information being shared by the client. Lawyers are not allowed to disclose anything related to the case of a client even if their lawyer-client relationship ends.

It is evident that the proposed way of endorsing the firm by the colleague fails to comply the duty of confidentiality. You can only disclose information related to the issue if and only if the client himself gave you the permission to and in some cases it is only allowed in accordance to the client's instructions for instance when it is in relation to other clients of the firm or specified lawyers but not like what the colleague proposed to publicly relate or use confidential cases that any third party can get the idea or lead to the discovery of what the client's case is all about.

Professor Questions:

Now you raise an interesting question that has not been addressed yet: what about the client that we represented successfully in that pharmaceutical litigation? Can we use this information to benefit of the office? Have we released any confidential information about the client in the suggested advertisement?

Beyond that, is the content ethical? What is the major point of the marketing piece? What are we telling the prospective client? Are there any problems with the information it included, aside from the potential issue of confidentiality which you are raised?

please cite any references