THE Supreme Court ruled last week that lawyers can advertise in newspapers to get customers for specific cases. That means lawyers can run ads to try to get people to sue other people or companies. The lawyers may even suggest who the people can sue if they'd like to make a bundle.

I like the Supreme Court ruling because if I ever need a lawyer, it's going to help me decide which lawyer to go to. First, I'll eliminate all the lawyers who advertise. I wouldn't dream of going to one of them.

Doctors are allowed to advertise now, too, and I'm no more apt to go to a doctor who tries to sell himself with an ad than to a lawyer who does.

I'm not against advertising. It's OK for Miller to tell us how good its beer is and it's OK for politicians to tell us how great they are, but I don't want to hear it from a doctor or a lawyer.

There are 650,000 lawyers in the United States and 520,000 doctors. You won't find more than a small percentage of either who will take advantage of this ruling and run ads for themselves. It may be legal but not many of them think it's ethical.

The majority of good, honest lawyers and the handful of great ones must be embarrassed to see how many money-grubbing ambulance-chasers there are in their profession. It would be wrong to suggest that every lawyer or every doctor who advertises is unethical, but that's the impression such ads leave on most of us.

The persistent suers in the legal profession often seem more interested in money than justice. The really big money for lawyers is in class-action suits. These are cases in which one plaintiff represents hundreds, thousands or sometimes even millions of others. If the lawyer wins one, he wins them all and may collect a part of the payoff from each participant. A 30 percent fee is considered standard. It helps account for why so many American lawyers rushed off to Bhopal , India, in the hope that they'd get in on a good thing by suing Union Carbide on behalf of a great many Indian victims. More than $35 billion in lawsuits were filed against Union Carbide. It's hard to believe the lawyers' interest was primarily justice for those Indian people, but lawyers have a way of rationalizing almost anything they do. They claim they are protecting the individual against the giant corporation and, of course, sometimes they are.

Melvin Belli, one of the American lawyers who went to India, filed suit for $15 billion on behalf of two Bhopal residents. If he were to win the suit and get the standard 30 percent legal fee, Belli would collect $4.5 billion. He could buy a couple of minutes on "Dynasty" every week for that much money, but Belli gets so much free publicity he doesn't have to advertise.

Americans think of criminal trials when they think of lawyers, but most of the good and important work lawyers do isn't related to crime. Lawyers do their heaviest work behind the scenes in business. They make business work by keeping it organized and legal.

There are a great many doctors and lawyers who take their principal pleasure in life from doing good things for other people. I have known enough of both to be certain this is true. They get up in the morning and are concerned not with making a living, but with what they can do for their patients and their clients. They are not businessmen, they are professionals. Success for them is not expressed by numbers. They've had a good day if they've done something good for another human being. They like the money but it isn't what gets them up in the morning.

When a lawyer advertises, it cheapens the law. It cheapens our judicial system when money becomes more important than the fundamental principles of justice and fairness.