The idea that the system of attorneys in America should be altered is not a new one, as it has been argued by many policy makers and thinkers for years now. This latest push, however, seems to have greater significance, as it is coming so soon after the major changes of the health care bill were voted into policy. While the majority of America has not turned its focus onto this issue of attorneys, it is not impossible that after the dust has settled around the health care debate, in the favor of one side or the other, then the next topic of contention may be equally available attorneys.

According to the website of Singlepayerlegal.org, “280 million Americans lack basic legal care insurance, making it impossible to get the affordable legal care that they need and deserve.” The website also makes arguments that point out that American attorneys offer no greater services than do attorneys of other nations such as Britain and Japan, where legal costs are substantially lower. While all Americans do technically have the right to an attorney in a criminal trial, these attorneys are often poorly trained or negligent, and not the quality of lawyer that citizens might be able to have if only the costs weren’t so terribly high.

The website also points a number of other startling statistics about attorneys, ranging from the fact that most attorneys provided only eight minutes of pro-bono legal work per day to those who needed it, to the fact that 75% of poor Americans who get involved with a serious legal problem each year simply cannot pay the necessary costs to hire an attorney. According to Singlepayerlegal.org, attorneys in America could be providing significantly more in the way of services for citizens, ensuring that each citizen receives as much legal aid as he or she might need. Instead, attorneys are primarily motivated by the large amounts of money they can earn by charging such exorbitant prices, regardless of the fact that a large number of Americans simply cannot afford attorneys’ services.

The issue is, of course, not simple at all. Attorneys have as much of a right to make a profit from their work as do any workers, and the fact that their work requires such a specific and highly honed set of skills does support the high prices which attorneys are able to charge. Yes, this does prevent some individuals from having access to the services of an attorney, but this would seem to be an inherent function of the capitalist system, as opposed to a terrible flaw. It is not unlike the system with doctors, in which doctors have their own highly specialized and focused set of skills, which allows them to charge high prices for their services. But the services of a doctor are rather unlike the services of an attorney. Whereas access to a doctor may blatantly and directly mean the difference between life and death, access to an attorney doesn’t necessarily have the same immediate effect. Indeed, an attorney’s job is much more fluctuating and uncertain than that of a doctor, if only because an attorney’s job is based inherently off of interpretation and supporting that interpretation. For all that doctors still need interpretation, medicine is closer to a science than law. Attorneys’ services are, therefore, of a rather different nature than those of doctors, and as a result, it is not clear that attorneys’ services should be as available as doctors’.

The primary reason that one could argue for attorneys to be available to all Americans equally is that, if they are not available, then you do encounter many circumstances in which equality is undermined. Some might argue that equality is not necessarily as much of a value of America as it might initially seem; capitalism simply guarantees a certain level of equality, but it does not actually guarantee utter equality. That being said, however, it does stand out when one side of a conflict may hire a bank of very skilled, very expensive attorneys with years of experience, capable of easily making that side’s case, whereas the other side can afford no attorneys at all, and therefore is at a significant disadvantage. In such a case, regardless of what the facts are, it is possible that the side with the stronger bank of attorneys may be able to win, thus unbalancing the nature of the justice system. The justice system, at least, should be equal and unbiased, and for some citizens to have access to resources which can tip the balance of the justice system into their favors, while others lack access to those same resources, is clearly an issue of inequality.

The issue could be aided simply by ensuring that all provided attorneys for defendants are effective and capable, but this is problematic for obvious reasons. Those attorneys who are likely most effective at their jobs are also likely the most expensive attorneys, and the least likely to be in the position of a public defender, not earning much money. Though this is perhaps too much of a blanket statement on attorneys, and there surely are exceptions, it does seem to be a fairly accurate generalization.

The issue of whether or not to ensure equal access to attorneys in a similar way as has been done with doctors is very, very complex; regardless of whether or not it should be case, it is entirely likely that no change will be made on the issue for quite some time, simply because of the complexity of dealing with all of the different interests and parties surrounding it. Nonetheless, on the heels of the health care reform act, it is worth imagining what else might be changed for the better.

The argument which Alexander provided was that the restrictions which had previously been in place impinged upon the rights granted to lawyers by the First Amendment. These restrictions prevented lawyers from making ads with a number of subject matters, including “attention-getting techniques unrelated to attorney competence,” as the alien ad would have done. The district court did not agree to fully lift the restrictions, as it still thought that restrictions on ads targeting accident victims before 30 days had passed were acceptable. The lawyers then appealed the decision, and the 2nd Circuit agreed with the district court, but also judged that the prohibition against fictitious law firms was constitutional and important, as well. The constitutionality of that judgment was based solely on the fact that depicting fictitious law firms could be harmfully misleading, as opposed to simple advertising practice. Thus, lawyers should not be allowed to depict fictitious law firms, so as to avoid any misleading information.

The moratorium on directly advertising to accident victims is simply reflective of a movement that all lawyers be subject to a similar moratorium on “ambulance chasing”. While lawyers are allowed to advertise general skill in matters that might be of significance for victims of a particular accident, they cannot directly solicit or advertise to those victims. Furthermore, the victims can come to lawyers for help, as long as the lawyers did not directly solicit that help.

These changing restrictions reflect nothing so much as a greater understanding and appreciation for harm to the consumer, and also for how much common-sense should apply to such issues. It has always been true that lawyers have served a very nitpicky, nuanced role in America, under which they would seek to find every possible loophole or gap in an argument and either take advantage of those holes and gaps, or plug them up. As such, in the past, it actually might have been entirely believable that laws against depicting lawyers in such a fictitious manner might have been entirely valid. After all, there could theoretically be some individuals who were so taken in by such ridiculous ads that they did believe lawyers were capable of doing such absurd feats.

But appreciation for common sense has increased, and it is no longer necessary for lawyers to quibble and worry about such minor affairs as whether or not lawyers can market themselves with such fictitious flair. The only thing that truly matters in these changes is that the consumer be protected from false advertising in a misleading, harmful sense. In general, this is a positive move for lawyers, as it enforces a basic idea which is all too easy to lose track of amidst other major tenets of being a lawyer. The basic idea in question is that taking advantage of clients and consumers is bad, and should be prevented first and foremost.

Many times, the function of a lawyer is that of a “devil-in-the-details” creator. The lawyer’s job is to design a contract such that every possible detail is accounted for, and there is no chance to misinterpret…but it can sometimes also be to slip a clause in there in obscuring language which will then cause a great deal of trouble for any individual without the necessary knowledge to search for such a clause. In other words, lawyers can use their skills to manipulate and take advantage of clients via cleverly deceptive tactics. These tactics are often not illegal, because the lawyer did still put in the provision in question in plain sight of the contract signer, and the signer had every opportunity to notice or ask questions, or simply to refuse to sign.

Though these changes on ad restrictions actually seem to be in the favor of advertising lawyers, the simple nature of the change sends a message to lawyers about what is most important to the district court and the 2nd Circuit court: protecting consumers. Lawyers are able to use traditional marketing tricks, like flashy effects and pictures, in order to sell their service, certainly. But ads which are intentionally misleading are not allowed, preventing lawyers from essentially hoodwinking consumers into pursuing the services of those lawyers. For instance, one particular mentioned example had to do with an ad depicting three different lawyers from three different law firms. The ad, however, named them as “The Dream Team,” which then made it seem as if these lawyers were all part of the same firm. This was false advertising in an unacceptable sense, in that the lawyers were not part of the same firm, and believing that they were was damagingly misleading for consumers. The emphasis, then, is on protecting the consumers from the kind of “innocuous” deception for which lawyers are famous, as evidenced by the plethora of lawyer jokes in the world today.

While the repeal on most of the restrictions for lawyer’s ads is not a truly outrageous or extraordinary thing, it does send a strong message out from the courts, a message which should be supported and repeated. Deception, even via omission as opposed to outright lying, is unacceptable when dealing with consumers and potential clients.

Calling themselves the Digital Due Process coalition, this initiative is pushing for laws such as a requirement that police and other law enforcement agencies get a warrant granted to them by a judge when they wish to have access to a given employee’s emails, documents, and location data, as reported by Ryan Singel of Wired.com. This push obviously comes from the fact that these sources of information can often hold very sensitive items, and if law enforcement agencies do not need to go to a judge in order to attain access to them, then invasions of privacy could in fact become much more frequent. Treating access to emails and the like at a company to be similar to how you would treat sensitive documents in terms of the law seems to be the best way to deal with these electronic forms of information.

Considering that the last law regarding electronic privacy was put into effect in 1986, there is a fair amount of updating that likely needs to occur before a privacy law for the modern world will officially exist. As an example, Singel points out how significantly the nature of email has changed since the time the law was initially implemented. When the Electronic Communications Protection Act was officially established as law in 1986, emails were generally downloaded directly onto a user’s computer from the central server. Messages that were left on that server for over six months, without being downloaded, could be taken by the police with only a subpoena, and not a judge’s permission, according to that law. If those emails were instead downloaded onto a computer, however, then the police would need a warrant to get to them. Considering, however, that tremendous amounts of information are currently being stored on the servers of major email companies like Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft, this law clearly needs to be updated. Right now, almost no email is downloaded onto the hard drive of the user’s computer; it is instead accessed directly at the mail server, which means that this law allows for an intrusively large amount of access to private emails and other data.

Google and Microsoft, then, as the major elements of this coalition, are seeking a change to the law such that any attempt to get at online information would require a judge’s approval. There are four principles governing Microsoft and Google’s push for legal change. The first would make it a law that the government needs a warrant of probably cause to get at non-publicly available email, Facebook, document, and photo information. The second is that similarly, under law should have to get a warrant for probably cause to get to location data for mobile devices. The third is that a judge’s approval is required to get contact information regarding what numbers were dialed on a phone or what email addresses were sent to from an email account. The fourth is that a self-issued subpoena can only be used to obtain data from one particular individual, as opposed to getting data from a group of individuals in a particular place at a particular time.

These principles are a good base from which to start thinking about modifying the existing laws. With the move of more and more information being stored online, greater privacy laws do need to be enacted to protect citizens from the dangers of such laws. Ironically, the fact that Google and Microsoft are pushing for many of these changes simply points to both companies’ fault in the entire affair, as they pushed more and more for individuals to begin putting information online without those individuals being protected by appropriate privacy laws. Now, they are essentially trying to fix the problem with their push for greater electronic privacy law, but they still refuse to have transparency about such issues as how often they are subpoenaed to provide users’ information to the government.

The entire affair is centered around the basic problem of laws needing to keep up with information technology, coupled with some of the more recent trends in law that have involved allowing for warrantless wiretapping and the like. At the moment, there is little doubt that law enforcement agencies are greatly appreciative of the lack of law in the domain of electronic privacy, if only because it makes it a very easy prospect to gain access to important information. Law enforcement agencies do not have to worry about the hurdles that they would have to overcome if greater electronic privacy laws were enacted. It is even entirely possible that the lack of such law has aided in numerous instances to solve a crime or catch a criminal. But the fact remains that there is an unacceptably low level of protection for the information of users kept online. In order to offer to citizens the appropriate amount of informational protection, the law of America does need to be updated, and the principles proposed by Google and Microsoft create a firm framework around which to do so. The problem, of course, is that as technology exponentially increases in complexity and capability, so will the gap between law and technology. There is no telling, then, how long any such update to electronic privacy laws will actually last in relevance. It’s easy to believe that in only a few short years, another update to the law might be necessary.