Leonard Gordon is the chair of Venable‘s Advertising and Marketing Group. He spent several years working for the FTC and uses his experience to help counsel his clients on marketing and business activity. He often represents clients dealing with the FTC, DOJ, CFPB, as well as business-to-business consumer protection, antitrust, and advertising issues. He is also the editor of the legal blog All About Advertising Law.
Episode Summary:
Leonard discusses his experience at the FTC and how it translates into the work he does now as head of his practice at Venable, specifically in terms of the pandemic. He then discusses his role as editor of All About Advertising, his personal timeline with the blog, the blog’s audience, and how it’s brought in clients. He really emphasizes the positive effects that the blog has on both the firm as a business and the writers as attorneys, and closes out by offering advice to people considering blogging.
Here’s the full episode and, down below, we have a selection of the best exchanges:
Have there been specific pandemic-related issues that have come up? Has the pandemic effected advertising at all?
It has. Two sort of big chunks: there was a fair amount of price gauging investigations and litigation. So, to the extent that you’re advertising a price, that certainly becomes a consumer protection issue. I think of advertising as almost anything that’s a consumer protection issue, so there was some of that. And then we helped clients respond to warning letters that the FTC had sent regarding claims that companies were making regarding products that might help you not get COVID, recover more quickly from COVID, other COVID-health-related claims. The FTC has sent maybe 150 warning letters, which is an unprecedented number; they might have sent 150 warning letters in the last six years. It’s been interesting because of the importance of COVID and widespread nature of some of these claims, so they decided to go with the warning letter. When companies don’t respond to the warning letter, they’re probably going to get sued, and the FTC has sued some of them for COVID-related claims. We’ve helped clients clean up some loose language on their website relating to dietary supplements that are good to but the marketing may have gone too far on COVID-related issues.
You’re the editor of the blog All About Advertising Law. What does that mean exactly? Do you have a group of people writing for it, and you’re the point person in charge of it?
It means I do a lot of the idea generation. I follow the FTC very closely and class action developments involving advertising very closely. When I see something that I think ought to be on the blog, I commandeer—or request volunteers—for one of our associates or partners to help me with the blog or do the blog themselves. And then also, others in our group come to me and say “I saw this case, I think it’d make a great blog.” We make sure we don’t have a conflict, which can be frustrating. Sometimes the things we want to blog about mention our clients who have very strict guidelines about being mentioned in blog posts, so we have to work around that. If our client has just gotten sued by the FTC, we probably won’t blog about that case. If we won a case for our client against the FTC, we’d probably blog about that. But we’ve had cases where we’ve won against the FTC, and the client will not let us blog about it. We’re always getting consent before writing about clients.
Do you have a regular roster of people within the firm who are writing or are you looking for volunteers?
There are a couple of people who are generally pretty good, and then I press the younger associates especially to write. First off, it makes sense for them to do that. I think one of the best ways to learn something is to speak about it or write about it. If you think you know about something and actually have to write or speak about it, it requires you to learn to a degree that just thinking you know something doesn’t involve. I think blogging and reading our blog are core things that our young associates need to do to develop as lawyers.
Yeah, it’s good exposure for them within the firm and externally.
Absolutely, that’s the reason we do the blog. I mean it’s to be a service to our clients and for their enjoyment…I may have anticipated one of your next questions. I’ve definitely gotten business. I’ll get a call, and say “How’d you find me?” And they’ll say “Google. I saw that you had written about this issue which is the problem that I’m facing” or “You seem like you know a lot about this issue I’m dealing with that you wrote about on your blog.” But I think it’s an incredibly worthwhile investment for the firm and for the younger associates too. They get comfortable writing, and then we also do webinars. We try to push them out there to do those as well because the only way you get better at speaking is to speak.
You’re right, I was going to ask you if you ever got business from the blog.
In the last several years, there were several matters big and small, when the blog was one of the reasons someone called me. And it’s even more important now because historically we would go to conferences and meet people that way. We’re certainly not doing face-to-face meetings and cocktail hours now. We’ve done some virtual conferences and spoken at some, but it’s hard to meet people that way, so it’s important to bolster your web presence.
Any advice on blogging that we haven’t mentioned yet?
The most important thing is to keep doing it. I end up doing it very early in the morning or very late at night because during the day I’m responding to emails, I’m on zoom and calls, I’m in court and depositions, I’m turning drafts around. So, it’s a sacrifice but to me, it’s an investment. It’s an important investment in brand-building, knowledge-building, and practice-building.
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