N.J. bills seek to curb mail solicitation by lawyers

Marcus Rayner was pulled over for speeding in North Jersey recently, and within days he had received a half-dozen letters from lawyers all over the state seeking to represent him.

Rayner, of Lambertville, heads a group advocating tort reform, so he knows how the game is played.

"I don't find it offensive, but I can see how someone would," he said. "It's more of a personal-privacy issue."

For decades there have been efforts to limit lawyers' ability to solicit and advertise for clients, but those attempts have run up against court rulings that largely uphold their right to do so.

Now, New Jersey legislators are considering bills that would force lawyers and other professionals to wait 30 days before contacting defendants and accident victims whose information was drawn from public-records searches.

Most states, including New Jersey and Pennsylvania, prohibit lawyers from soliciting clients in person or over the telephone but make exception for the mail.

"It's a consumer-protection issue," said State Sen. Nicholas Scutari (D., Union), a civil-litigation lawyer who sponsored the Senate bill. "We get calls from numerous people complaining about this. And it's not just attorneys; it's health-care professionals, investigators, chiropractors. It's a pretty unseemly practice."

The matter has been contentious within the legal community for decades, pitting questions of constitutional freedom against cleaning up the profession's sometimes "ambulance-chasing" image.

Bar associations in a number of states have fought to outlaw lawyers' soliciting, arguing that the practice demeans their profession.

Arnold Fishman, a Haddon Heights lawyer and trustee of the New Jersey Bar Association, said that though he opposed the criminal charges the bill calls for, he supported the overarching concept.

"Some of these letters are downright misleading," he said. "They talk about jail and consequences that couldn't conceivably apply with the charges they have. And the prices they're charging, they can't do anything but plead their clients guilty instead of mounting a real defense."

Although the legal establishment might want to clamp down, lawyers point out that there are no rules barring insurance-company representatives from accident scenes, where they can get victims to sign releases or give statements.

"A lot of victims don't know their rights," said David Deehl, a Florida lawyer who serves on the American Bar Association's civil-litigation and insurance councils. "The insurance company can get a statement where they'll lead them into saying the wrong thing. They can ruin their case."

Previous attempts to curb lawyers' outgoing mail have met with frequent and often successful challenges in the courts.

In March, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that a large portion of New York's revised rules on advertising and solicitation by lawyers was a violation of the First Amendment. One rule it exempted was a 30-day moratorium on contacting victims after accidents and disasters.

Scutari believes his bill, if passed, would withstand a legal challenge.

"We think the right to privacy trumps," he said.

These days, lawyers can get access to New Jersey police records through an electronic database run by the state.

But for years they went to municipal courts in person to look through traffic tickets and criminal charges.

Frances Blaum-Naughton, the court administrator in Cherry Hill, remembered when lawyers would show up on Fridays to comb through the records.

"In the heyday, we had about eight lawyers come," she said. "People would call up every once in a while and they're all upset that they'd gotten access to their information."