Law firm blog disclaimer requirements
The block that belongs at the end of every post, the second one you have to put on yourself, and what each line is doing there.
Copy whichever your post needs from the card on the right. The everyday one is taken apart underneath, a line at a time.
Both are reproduced exactly as they ship. Use them as they are or rewrite them; the next section is what a rewrite has to keep.
Six things the everyday block says. Two of them nobody checks.
The plain meaning first, because that is the part you have to agree with. The wording under each is what ends up on the page.
Say it is general information, not advice about the reader's problem.
Leave it out and a reader who acted on the post and missed a deadline has a cleaner argument that you were advising them.
Say that reading it does not make anybody your client.
Leave it out and when somebody became a client gets settled later, by whoever is arguing about it, not by you now.
Then say what does make somebody your client.
Leave it out and the line before it is a denial with nothing behind it. This half gives the answer: there is a document, and until it is signed you are not acting for them.
Send them to a lawyer admitted where they live.
Leave it out and a post about one state's law reads as advice in all fifty. Your blog has no idea where it was opened, and neither do you.
Ask them not to send you anything confidential.
Leave it out and the contact form under it collects facts about matters you may be conflicted out of.
Say the law moved and this was written on a date.
Leave it out and a four-year-old post presents itself as current law. This line does its most work on the oldest page you have, the one you have forgotten.
Model Rule 7.2(d) wants the name and contact details of a lawyer or firm responsible for the content. That is your byline, not your disclaimer, so check your blog template carries it. Whether a post is a communication about your services at all is the scope question, which has its own page, as does who answers for a page a model drafted.
Take a line out. Two of them are free.
Switch any line off and the block loses it. Four of the six are read for. The other two are yours to delete, and knowing which is which before you delete one is the point.
Nothing required is missing.
All four read-for lines are on the page, in one block, in the right place.
It goes at the end of the post, above your sources.
After the last paragraph, before the authorities you cited. Not the sidebar, not only the site footer, not halfway down. A reader who scrolls to the end should hit it without hunting, and so should anybody reading the page two years from now. The notice goes under it.
The rules want a second block on a case result. Nothing is going to add it for you.
The pack carries a prior-results notice for posts that report an outcome: fifty-one words, written for that job. Nothing selects it, because selecting it turns on a post being marked as a case result and nothing marks a post that way. Every draft gets the everyday block, and the notice is yours to paste in.
- The notice is never picked for you. No part of the product marks a post as a case result, so every attorney draft gets the everyday block, whatever the post is about.
- Which is the outcome you wanted anyway. The two are alternatives rather than a pair, so the notice arriving on its own would take the everyday block off. Both on the page is the sensible state, and pasting is the only route there.
- So knowing which post needs it is on you. Not the verdict post you knew was a verdict post. The explainer with your own outcome in paragraph nine.
You reach for an example in a general explainer, and the clearest one you have is a matter you won. From that sentence on the post reports an achievement on behalf of a client, which is what Comment [3] to Model Rule 7.1 is about: a truthful report of results may be misleading if presented so as to lead a reasonable person to form an unjustified expectation that the same results could be obtained for other clients in similar matters, without reference to the specific factual and legal circumstances of each client's case. The same comment supplies the answer: an appropriate disclaimer or qualifying language, it says, may preclude that finding. Nothing reads your paragraphs and works out the post changed under you, so paste the notice in when an outcome of yours is in it. If you are not sure, paste it anyway.
Quoted above: ABA Model Rule 7.1, its Comment [3] and Model Rule 7.2(d), read on americanbar.org. Your state adopts and numbers them itself.
This is one of the things Verand puts on the page for you.
Everything above is the answer whether or not you ever use the product. You name your state once during setup; after that the block is in the draft before you open it, above the sources. If a draft turns up with a disclaimer written into the prose, that one comes out before the real block goes on: two in different wording is worse than either alone, because a reader cannot tell which binds you.
- Written in, not remembered. The block is in the draft before anybody reads it, not something an associate has to recall at eleven at night.
- What it will not do is read your post. Nothing decides a draft has become a case result, so the notice is on you, and we would rather say so than let you assume something is watching.
- Your wording survives. The load-bearing language is what gets read for, so a block your ethics counsel wrote passes on its own terms.
- A person presses publish. Always. Verand cannot publish to your site on its own, and no setting lets it.
This is a generic baseline, not your state's rule.
There is no national regulator of attorney advertising. Each state's highest court adopts the rules and its bar enforces them, and both the numbering and the substance move. What ships is the baseline modelled on the Model Rules. The states with their own filing and labelling regimes, Florida, Texas, New York, New Jersey and Louisiana among them, are not encoded yet.
Researched by us, reviewed by an operator.
Validated against the ABA Model Rules as your state adopts them. AI-researched and operator-reviewed. Your counsel confirms applicability. Not legal advice. We will not say an attorney read it until one has.
For anyone who wants the receipt: the blocks are the variants law-disc-not-legal-advice (default) and law-disc-prior-results (content type case_results) in the us-state-bar-generic pack, version 1.0.0, review status internal-reviewed. Each renders as one block before the sources section; 80 to 320 words for the default, 30 to 150 for the notice, paraphrase permitted. The notice's content type is case_results, and nothing in the app writes that value, which is why it is never selected for you. Three claims do sit in the publication blockers and cannot go out at all: a guaranteed outcome, an unsubstantiated comparison with other lawyers, implying pull with a court. A missing disclaimer is not one of them; it marks the draft, it does not stop the publish.
The four we get asked every time.
Can I just use the blocks on this page?
Yes. The first is the same text that goes into drafts. Two things: check the engagement sentence matches how your firm actually opens a matter, and have whoever handles your ethics compliance read both before they go on two hundred posts. A baseline covering the common ground is not a document about your firm in your state.
Does it have to be word for word?
No. Rewrite both in your own voice. What has to survive are the ideas: the post is information and not legal advice, reading it creates no attorney-client relationship, a signed engagement agreement is what does, and the reader should speak to a lawyer admitted where they are. On the notice it is two: prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome, and the content may be attorney advertising.
No client is named. Do I still need the prior-results notice?
Naming is a different question. The comment to Model Rule 7.1 is about a truthful report of what you achieved leading a reader to expect the same for themselves, and an anonymised settlement figure does that as well as a named one: the reader measures themselves against the number, not the client. Anonymising changes what you owe the client. It does not change what the post does to the reader.
We already have a disclaimer in the site footer. Is that enough?
A footer disclaimer sits on every page including the careers page, the contact form and your office page, and it is the first thing to go stale when the site gets rebuilt. It also cannot do the conditional half of the job: the notice belongs on posts that report an outcome and nowhere else, and a footer carries it everywhere or nowhere. Put the block at the end of the post, where the claims it qualifies are.
The block on every post, without anybody remembering it.
Every draft arrives with the disclaimer on it, above the sources, in your firm's wording. Seven days, every feature unlocked, one click to cancel.
Starter carries the compliance gate, every routine and the full crawl. Plans differ on volume, sites and engines.