An attorney sent 14 unsolicited faxes about attorney malpractice to another solo lawyer. The recipient sued. The case ran to New York’s highest court. The court said the faxes were fine.
The story of Stern v. Bluestone reads like something a satirist would talk themselves out of writing. Andrew Lavoott Bluestone, a Manhattan attorney whose practice concentrated on attorney-malpractice litigation, spent 16 months faxing short essays titled “Attorney Malpractice Report” to another solo practitioner named Peter Marc Stern. Fourteen faxes in all, from November 2003 through March 2005, according to the New York Court of Appeals opinion published by Cornell’s Legal Information Institute.
Stern sued under the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, the same statute that governs robocalls and junk faxes. The trial court sided with him. The Appellate Division affirmed. Bluestone appealed.
In June 2009, the Court of Appeals unanimously reversed, 7-0. It held that Bluestone’s faxes were not “unsolicited advertisements” under the TCPA.
Newsletter, not billboard
The court leaned on Federal Communications Commission regulations that draw a careful line inside the fax world. Content that carries “only information, such as industry news articles, legislative updates, or employee benefit information” isn’t an advertisement, the FCC has said. Even better for defendants like Bluestone: “an incidental advertisement contained in such a newsletter does not convert the entire communication into an advertisement.”
The essays, the court found, discussed legal topics on the merits. The fact that they carried Bluestone’s name and website at the top wasn’t enough to tip the balance.
There is a quiet backstory in the record worth noting. After Bluestone lost an earlier TCPA case brought by a different attorney who had prevailed against him in similar proceedings, he removed two phrases from his later faxes to Stern: “concentrating on Attorney malpractice Litigation” and “inquiries are welcome.” Reasonable read: he had seen how close he’d come to the line and stepped back a pace.
Why the case still comes up
Stern v. Bluestone is the citation people reach for when a defendant argues that a fax was substantively informational and only incidentally identified its sender. It runs in the opposite direction from a 2025 Sixth Circuit ruling that held a promotional fax can be an “ad” even when the sender doesn’t sell the product being promoted. Same underlying question about where the line sits.
For a modern reader who might only need to send a fax from computer once in a while, the doctrinal weeds matter less than the shape of the story. A 14-fax dispute between two solo practitioners travelled from a New York trial court to the state’s highest court, produced a written opinion, and became precedent that TCPA lawyers still cite almost two decades later. Fax law is small, patient, and occasionally weird.
Sources: Stern v. Bluestone, 12 N.Y.3d 873 (2009); via the Law.com fax-news feed, 2026-08-07.