While media law attorneys perform a valuable, and unfortunately, all-too-necessary, function, there is a right way and wrong way to use them.

In our lawsuit-happy world, you'd probably be hard-pressed to find many editors or news directors whose office telephone doesn't include the news organization's lawyer among their speed dial directory's top ten.

Some of the bigger news media organizations routinely send nearly all of their content through legal counsel before going to press or air. Others, who don't have in-house lawyers (or the free help of the Student Press Law Center) and can't afford the $250/hour-plus cost of outside counsel to look at everything, still "lawyer-up" on a regular basis to assist with particularly sensitive or complex stories.

And while media law attorneys perform a valuable, and unfortunately, all-too-necessary, function, there is a right way and wrong way to use them.

Lyle Denniston, a veteran Supreme Court reporter who currently writes for Scotusblog, an online news site, once told a group I was part of that he believed one of the most dangerous threats to press freedom was a lawyer in the newsroom. His point wasn't that media lawyers were bad or unnecessary (although he certainly wished, as do I, that they were a lot less necessary), but that their role should be limited. Journalists, he felt, too often used lawyers in a way that bypassed their making their own important, if difficult, ethical and editorial calls.

Most editors aren't lawyers. But neither are most lawyers editors.

Getting information and advice from a lawyer should, reasonably, inform an editor's decision to publish or not publish, but it should rarely, if ever, be the final word.

As a media lawyer who has counseled some 14,000 journalists and journalism educators over the course of nearly two decades now, here are a few thoughts from this side of the telephone (or e-mail).

1. Don't ask, "Should I publish this?"
While one of the most frequent questions a media lawyer will get, it's also the one a good media lawyer should refuse to answer. We can help you understand the law and the risks. We can also provide you with editorial options that might reduce your legal exposure. However, it is up to you, the editor (and perhaps the publisher), to decide whether the risks outweigh the benefits of publication.

2. Realize that the safest answer for a lawyer is often to discourage publication.
An editor and a lawyer have two different, and sometimes conflicting, goals. An editor's job is to provide accurate, newsworthy information to his or her readers and audience. A lawyer's goal is primarily to limit the news media organization's liability. In most cases, if you don't publish something, you're not going to get sued for it, meaning the lawyer has done his or her job. Realize, however, that many important stories would never have been published if a lawyer alone - charged solely with keeping a newspaper or TV station out of court - had been allowed to make the final call. That doesn't mean, of course, that you should simply ignore your lawyer's advice since the flip side is that some costly media lawsuits could also probably have been avoided if the news organization had obtained or followed through on the suggestions of good legal counsel. As a journalist, however, you need to understand the built-in bias that can exist.

3. Not all lawyers are created equally.
That there are both competent and incompetent lawyers should come as no surprise. But there are many otherwise gifted lawyers who simply don't have a clue about media law or an appreciation of the press's role. The law, like medicine and just about everything else these days, is highly specialized. Your average family law attorney doesn't know much, if anything, about the latest cases to interpret the publisher immunity provisions of the Communications Decency Act. (Just like most media lawyers are probably pretty useless in providing advice about the most recent developments regarding child custody). Of particular note, it has been my general experience that most school district or university attorneys - while good at helping their clients navigate personnel matters, negotiate contracts and avoid institutional liability - have little understanding of the press's role and are not very useful (and often, are downright wrong) in helping student media navigate First Amendment and media law issues.

4. Become an informed consumer.
Just as it is important for you to know something about the various medicines before you automatically start popping those pills your doctor prescribed, it's also important that you take the time to understand the fundamentals of media law and do your best to stay informed about important legal developments that might affect you. A good lawyer should probe enough to identify the key issues that might arise in a given situation and help provide the answers you need, but it is important that you know at least enough about the law to determine when you need to seek outside assistance (or when a second legal opinion might be warranted). Exercising a bit of legal self-awareness can go a long way; it is usually much easier to help you avoid legal trouble in the first place than to get you out of it.

Mike Hiestand is an attorney, based in the far, upper left corner of the "Lower 48," and works as a legal consultant to the Student Press Law Center.