Unethical?

The Boston Bar Association has introduced a bill in the Massachusetts State Legislature prohibiting trust companies from soliciting employment as executor, administrator or trustee by advertisement "or by such other means as would, if employed for a like purpose by a member of the Bar, be a violation of the standards of professional conduct recognized and enforced by the courts of this Commonwealth." The Massachusetts Law Quarterly states the view of the proponents of this measure approximately as follows:

Many of the persons who call upon trust companies in response to advertising have no lawyers and ask the trust officer to recommend a good lawyer. The trust officer gives them a list composed of his friends or friends of the trust company and its counsel. The result is that a small group of lawyers is indirectly getting the benefit of expensive advertising and probate practice is improperly diverted from lawyers who are entirely competent to handle it.

One James H. Collins, writing in the current issue of Printers' Ink says: "Fundamentally, the trust company must be either wrong or right. If it is right, and a good thing for the public, the more it advertises and the greater the volume of business it receives, the greater the public good. If the trust company is wrong, why merely prohibit its advertising? Why not have the state cancel its charter? Finally, if a business has a legitimate reason for existence and yet can be advertisingly gagged through legislation that will benefit only a minority, where will the line be drawn? Why not laws to prevent the advertising of automobiles because this advertising decreases the demand for postillions?"

Criticisms by lawyers of trust company advertising is not confined to Massachusetts. The performing of legal services by trust companies is prohibited by the laws of Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New York, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington.