Sarasota Personal Injury Attorney and MADD at the Bottom of Drinking Glass Controversy
A Sarasota personal injury attorney who received awards from Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) for his volunteer contributions in the past is now finding himself in trouble with the organization for his firm's promotional drinking glasses using the MADD logo.
After sponsoring a golf outing for the DUI-fighting organization, Sarasota personal injury attorney Jeffrey Luhrsen was given permission by MADD Florida Director Don Murray to use the logo on promotional drinking glasses for his law firm.
However, Murray and other MADD members were not too happy with the final look of the glasses. It turns out that the glasses just featured the MADD logo and a "victim hot line" phone number on them. In other words, there was no mention on the glasses that the number was for Luhrsen's law firm. Luhrsen also did the same thing in online advertising featuring just the MADD logo and a phone number; thus giving the impression that people were calling MADD when they were in fact dialing his law firm.
Murray expressed his concern in a Herald Tribune story that Luhrsen cross-promoted the brands and implied that MADD endorsed the law firm, which he said was not true. National MADD spokeswoman Misty Moyes was quoted in the story as saying that MADD is about preventing DUI and helping victims of drunken driving accidents rather than promoting individual businesses.
Ethics attorneys have said that such misleading advertising is problematic in that it could have given Luhrsen an unfair advantage against other personal injury attorneys seeking DUI cases. Specifically, these attorneys and ethics experts have said that Luhrsen would have benefited greatly by improperly piggybacking off of a nationally-recognized and credible organization like MADD.
Luhrsen was quoted in the Herald Tribune story as saying that it is a "pretty far reach" to automatically assume that the MADD logo and phone number were for the same thing. Whether rationalizing or speaking what he truly believed, Luhrsen has agreed to stop giving away the drinking glasses, which had been distributed to visitors to his office and people at a Bradenton street festival. He also changed the controversial online advertising.
Luhrsen said in the story that he joined MADD at the request of Murray and added that he has done other volunteer work for the organization beyond sponsoring the golf outing. Prior to this controversy, Luhrsen had received several awards from MADD this year for his lobbying efforts in Tallahassee on behalf of the organization. He currently serves on the Florida Highway Patrol's advisory council and Governor Charlie Christ' s task force on DUI prosecution and enforcement.
It will be interesting to see where the relationship between MADD and Luhrsen goes from here. The Herald Tribune story detailed a previous potential conflict of interest between Luhrsen and MADD. It turns out that Murray hired the wife of Luhrsen's office manager a year ago to be the Manasota MADD victim advocate, a position which includes providing drunken driving victims with legal resources. Luhrsen clarified in the story that his law firm is just one of many law firms on the legal list and that the advocate, LaVonne Bower, does not point victims to any particular law firms.
MADD has said that it does not have a problem with the relationship between Luhrsen's firm and Brower, and added in the story that many of its volunteers have connections to law firms.
With that said, I'd hope that MADD and Luhrsen would like to put such bad publicity behind and get back to helping drunken driving and personal injury victims, respectively.