When you watch this, you'll swear that it's a spoof--not a real ad televised by a licensed, practicing attorney.
You'll be wrong. Dan Muessig is a criminal defense attorney in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His ad shows a series of actors playing criminals that Muessig has sprung loose from the pokey. It's so preposterously over-the-top that some lawyers find it offensive. Elizabeth Daley writes for Reuters:
Tom Loftus, spokesman for the Allegheny County Bar Association, found the ad “insulting to Pittsburgh lawyers and lawyers across the country, who take great pride in their profession.”
He said he worried that the video could be misinterpreted: “There could be kids watching it, or people who don’t even understand what tongue-in-cheek means, and what they’ll see is: If you commit a crime, this attorney will get you off without any explanation.”
Muessig defends the commercial as a reflection on real problems in the criminal justice system:
“It’s a send-up of the cartoonishly amoral Jewish criminal-defense attorney,” he said. “The criminal justice system is broken, it creates a system where we are basically putting people on a conveyor belt to prison. If you want to get your ire up, get your ire up about that.”
-via Nag on the Lake
Imagine if he'd said Catholic or Muslim instead, if that helps you see his motivation as bigoted.