TALLAHASSEE - A bill to place more restrictions on legal advertising in Florida has likely been sidelined for the year, along with several other key tort-reform proposals, as the state’s legislative session heads into the final stretch.
This comes in the wake of statistics released earlier this year about the extent of legal advertising in two major markets in Florida. Tampa-St. Petersburg residents viewed 67,000 legal services ads in the third quarter of 2019, according to a study by the American Tort Reform Association (ATRA), while 46,000 such ads ran in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area, at a total cost of $13 million.
The number of legal ads aired during this time period in the Tampa area increased 4 percent, compared to a rise of 18 percent in the Miami region. In addition to these local television ads, residents in the two regions also saw an estimated $71 million worth of national legal advertising from July to September of last year, according to the ATRA report.
The legal ads ran in the Tampa market 13 times more often than ads for apparel stores, ATRA reported. And in the Miami region, legal ads were broadcast nine times as often as pizza delivery and restaurant spots, the report found.
Even so, a Florida Senate bill to better regulate the ads never advanced to a committee vote in the current session – despite the prevalence of the ads and a warning by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last year to unnamed law firms and other legal ad purveyors that their solicitations for drug injury clients were misleading and potentially unlawful.
SB 1288, authored by Sen. Tom Wright (R-New Smyrna Beach), attempted to make sure that such ads were better understood and more transparent. But with only a couple weeks left in the legislative session, it has failed to advance.
Other proposed tort reforms seem to have met the same fate, including a bill to regulate third-party litigation lending and one that would have based medical expenses in personal injury claims on customary charges.
“I think we’ve got a stalemate,” Michael Carlson, president and CEO of the Personal Insurance Federation of Florida, told the Florida Record. A bill supported by trial attorneys to repeal the current personal injury protection (PIP) auto insurance system in Florida is also likely dead for the year, Carlson said.
“You’ve got really well-lobbied stakeholder groups involved on all these legislative issues who don’t agree, No. 1,” he said. “And No. 2, I would say there’s a lack of legislative leadership to get major reforms passed.”
Both of the legal advertising bills proposed in the legislature are effectively dead, according to Carlson.
“The Senate bill never got heard by any committee, and the House bill, I think, was heard by one committee,” he said.
The legal advertising bills under consideration went beyond concerns about medical-alert ads whose scare tactics can potentially lead patients to decide not to take their prescription drugs, according to Carlson.
“The bills went to whether legal ads or legal solicitations are clear enough or transparent enough, or whether legal advertising should fall more squarely under our unfair and deceptive trade practices act in Florida,” he said.
An FTC spokesman said he had no updated information on whether the federal agency is satisfied that the legal practitioners and lead generators’ responses to the FTC warning letters about their television ads.
“Our communications, if any, with the parties would be non-public, and we have not issued any (news) releases about FTC enforcement actions in this area,” Mitchell Katz said in an email to the Record.
A recent nationwide Federal Drug Administration study found that 66 patients had suffered adverse consequences, including 33 strokes and seven deaths, as a result of viewing such medical-alert ads. The cases, which involved patients who discontinued their blood-thinner medications after viewing the medical-alert advertising, were identified on an FDA database.
“Misleading advertisements drum up fear in an attempt to gain clients, but there are serious repercussions, and in the worst scenarios the cost can be human life,” ATRA President Tiger Joyce said in a prepared statement.
The Florida Bar also has rules in place for members who advertise, including prohibitions on misleading or deceptive communications, material omissions, guarantees of success and celebrity endorsements. Dramatizations are also covered in the Florida Bar regulations.
The Florida Bar, however, declined to respond to a query about whether such advertising should have additional oversight, as proposed in Wright’s bill.
“Your question regarding attorney advertising is a policy question for the Legislature to decide,” the bar said in an email.