Criminal defense advertising is governed by your state bar, and the rules bite hardest on exactly the claims a marketer reaches for first. Guarantees, superlatives, and anything that implies an outcome. Here’s what the rules restrict in practice, and how to write pages that don’t need rewriting after a grievance.
Every defense firm has heard a story about a colleague getting a letter from the bar over a website. Most of the anxiety is misplaced, and the parts that genuinely matter are narrower than people fear.
Most of what a defense firm needs to know collapses into three ideas that appear, in some form, in every jurisdiction.
Everything else is procedural: labels, disclaimers, record retention, and the rules on solicitation. Worth knowing, but rarely what gets a firm into difficulty.
Not on the website headline. On the review response.
Someone leaves a critical review. It’s unfair, or it misstates what happened, and the instinct is to correct the record. The moment the reply says “when we handled your case” or explains what really occurred at the hearing, the firm has confirmed a client relationship and discussed a matter in public. Several state bars have disciplined lawyers for precisely this, and it is a confidentiality problem rather than an advertising one, which makes it worse.
The safe response acknowledges the person, states the firm’s general standard, and offers to speak privately. It never confirms they were a client. We draft them that way by default.
The compliant version of a charge page is also the better-ranking version, which is a genuinely useful coincidence.
Name the statute. Give the classification and the penalty range as the code states them. Explain the process and the defenses that exist. Say what your firm does. That page contains no prohibited claim, and it’s the kind of page that earns citations because it answers the question rather than asserting a conclusion.
The non-compliant version says “aggressive representation” four times and promises to fight for you. It also ranks for nothing, because it says nothing a search engine can match to a query.
We build the required disclaimers in from the start rather than retrofitting them, keep case results and testimonials inside what your jurisdiction permits, and flag anything ambiguous for your review before it goes live. Where a rule is unclear we take the conservative reading, because the downside is asymmetric.
For reference on what compliant pages produce: our anchor defense engagement holds 1,689 ranking keywords and 318 AI Overview citations without a single guarantee anywhere on the site. See the full results or how the criminal defense program works.
Send us the URL. We will read it against your jurisdiction's advertising rules and tell you what we would change, whether or not you hire us.
Family-owned since 1999 · 27 years marketing law firms · Washougal, WA