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Howard Brill Questions Legal Ethics of GoFundMe

3 min read

Howard Brill, the renowned University of Arkansas School of Law professor, told a group of attorneys last week that he was troubled by a case involving a Little Rock lawyer who started a GoFundMe campaign to fund a lawsuit.

Brill pointed to a screenshot of the fundraising solicitation, which had been posted on Facebook, during his “Recent Developments in Legal Ethics” presentation last week in a conference room at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock.

“I’m really troubled by this whole donate money, GoFundMe business,” said Brill, who served as chief justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court from September 2015 to December 2016. He was the law school’s first Vincent Foster Professor of Legal Ethics & Professional Responsibility.

Attorney Chris Corbitt started the online fundraiser to raise money for a November 2017 lawsuit brought by landlords against the city of Little Rock over alleged violations of constitutional rights tied to inspecting rental properties. The lawsuit is pending.

Brill, who began teaching at the school in 1975, said a person can give money to a lawyer to help with the expenses in a lawsuit. “But here the lawyer seems to be asking for contributions,” Brill said in an email to Arkansas Business. “He talks about representing landlords, but the landlords are not asking for money to pay him; he is asking himself.”

Still, Brill said didn’t have enough information on how the fundraising campaign works to have an opinion.

Corbitt told Arkansas Business that he realized the GoFundMe campaign was in “gray area. … I set that up at the request of other landlords that wanted to help fund the lawsuit.”

Corbitt said he is paying for the lawsuit himself and will only receive legal fees if the landlords win the case.

He said no one had donated to the campaign as of last week.

Advertising by Lawyers
During his nearly hourlong presentation, Brill said he expected advertising rules for attorneys to be relaxed in the next two to three years.

Advertising rules for lawyers are strict and include bans on testimonials, endorsements or dramatizations. Those rules were adopted at bar association meetings about 20 years ago and “represented a compromise between those who wanted pretty wide-open advertising and those who didn’t want any at all,” said Brill, who has spoken to attorneys 11 times in the last decade as part of the Rose Law Firm’s legal ethics series, which is free to lawyers.

But no one “really knows” what a testimonial, endorsement or dramatization is, he said.

The American Bar Association is pushing to toss the advertising restrictions but keep a ban on false or misleading advertising, he said.

“Whether that takes care of GoFundMe, I don’t know,” he said.

Judicial Elections
Brill hasn’t decided whether state Supreme Court justices should be appointed or continue to be elected.

“I can see arguments both ways on that,” Brill told Arkansas Business in an interview.

Judicial elections mean that candidates travel the state, shaking hands and meeting people. And voters have a sense of participation, he said.

But if the justices are appointed, then “you’re more likely to get judges who have different backgrounds,” he said.

The justices might come from legal services for the poor or from a corporate law office.

“I think one of the key things is elections these days have become so unpleasant that some people don’t want to run,” he said.

Ideally, judicial campaigns would spur candidates to talk about significant issues like improving the state’s justice system or its court structure, Brill said.

Instead, “most of the campaigns by the candidates are very bland,” he said. “We see a picture of the candidate and a dog, and they say vote for me.”

He would like for candidates to say what they would do on the bench and what changes they would make. “But I don’t know that that’s important to most people out there,” Brill said. “They’d rather see a picture of the dog probably.”

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