Justice Will Sellers explains new regulations on lawyer advertising to the Brandon and Christopher show podcast

May 30, 2025 – MONTGOMERY, AL – Alabama Supreme Court Justice Will Sellers (R) joined the Brandon and Christopher Show (BCS) Podcast to explain how the Alabama appellate courts works and the daily duties of a justice on the Alabama Supreme Court. Among the many topics discussed were new rules regulating commercials that lawyers make promoting their law practice.

The Alabama Gazette asked about what made the new rules come about.

"The Bar, like other professional groups, is self-policing and members of the Bar try to do things to discipline themselves and pass rules and regulations," Justice Sellers explained. "About - I am going to say in 2018 - when Sam Irby was the President of the Bar Association one of Sam's initiatives was that we needed to look at the lawyers advertising rules. They hdn't been changed in thirty or forty years – maybe even longer than that. And as people may recall it used to be that lawyers cannot advertise at all. That there was an absolute prohibition against that; and the United States Supreme Court said, 'You can't do that because you can't restrain commercial speech and lawyers are engaged in business and so you can't restrict them from adverting."

"Since that time, as many people have noted and lawyers have noted, lawyer advertising had become more and more pervasive and sometimes the things that are advertised may not be exactly as correct as it should be," Sellers continued. "And it also has come up with the advent of the internet, there are various things that you could do to position your law firm over other law firms so that in an initiating a search the search would always come up Brandon Moseley. You can pay for that. So if somebody says criminal lawyer (in an internet search) Brandon Moseley would always come up. If somebody searches for Divorce lawyer: Brandon Moseley (Brandon Moseley is not an attorney, but this was used hypothetically) would come up. Trying to make it so that if lawyer advertising is permitted, that there are restrictions on it so that consumers are protected. So if somebody advertises that they recovered a judgement that they really did recover a judgement."

While these announced changes seem sudden, this has actually been a lengthy process.

"What happened is that Mr. Irby had made a study group task force with some really fine lawyers from all across the Bar look into this issue and they spent several years looking at proposed rules - looking at what other states have done and things like that," Justice Sellers explained. So as a result they had some proposed rules, accepted public comment. And so just in the last month we have promulgated some new lawyer advertising rules to try to protect the consumer."

Justice Sellers said that he could not address the new rules in detail, because of concern that there might be a lawsuit by some law firms challenging the new rules.

"It is my understanding - and I haven't seen this - but there are some law firms that are not happy with these new rules and there is a possibility that our Court and the Bar Association may be subject to some kind of suit that these rules are restraining commercial speech," said Justice Sellers. "That has at least been threatened. I don't want to say too much about the new rules. We are trying to regulate the practice of law - so that consumers rights are protected and lawyers' commercial speech rights are protected - in a positive way so that when they search for a lawyer or engage a lawyer they truly have the level of expertise, competence, and experience to handle the case that they are advertising they can actually handle."

The Brandon and Christopher Show is cohosted by Alabama Gazette Lead Reporter and Content Manager Brandon Moseley and the Alabama Political Contributor's Christopher Peeks.