The Trial Lawyers' New Moniker

I don't really want to join the chorus of people ridiculing the nation's plaintiff lawyers for renaming their professional organization recently. But I do sort of wish that Association of Trial Lawyers of America had decided to remain ATLA, for perhaps no other reason than that the new choice, the American Association for Justice, sounds like a tort reform group. It's one of those fuzzy, inside-the-Beltway, Astroturf-lobbying-group sort of name choices that get so tedious after a while.

Besides, D.C. is already home to the Institute for Justice, which is not to be confused with the Alliance for Justice  or the American Center for Law and Justice. (Can you guess which is the liberal one? I thought not.) Elsewhere, you have groups like the Texas Civil Justice League, the Illinois Civil Justice League. Then there's Justice at Stake, the Committee for Justice for All, and the Center for Justice and Democracy. "Justice" has simply lost its punch.

The refreshing thing about "ATLA" was not only that it had a muscular Greek Titan sound to it, but also that it was just so straightforward (like the wonderful National Hot Dog and Sausage Council, or www.hot-dog.org.) I suspect that the people who care about such things will always know that the AAJ is a bunch of trial lawyers, and the people who don't care will just be confused.

Rather than waste any more money on image-spiffing, the trial lawyers would do well to read some of their own history. They've gone this route before. While researching my own book, I found the story in David vs. Goliath: ATLA and the Fight for Everyday Justice, which details the group's first foray into PR back in 1955, when ATLA was called the National Association of Claimants' Compensation Attorneys (NACCA).

After years of PR efforts to combat attacks on contingency-fee legal practice, ATLA's leaders eventually acknowledged that polls showed they weren't making a lot of headway. In 1969, the dean of the University of Arizona Law School wrote in the group's magazine, Trial, that PR was a lost cause. He summed it up nicely by saying:

"The relationship between the public and the legal profession has always been a strange, complex, and completely illogical phenomenon....on one hand, society loads lawyers with public and private responsibilities far beyond that of other citizens; on the other, it professes to be convinced that lawyers as a class are venal, self-seeking and pettifogging."