Module 6 · Audit before anyone sees it

The compliance check

Good marketing copy for a plumber is a rule violation for a lawyer. That is the whole problem in one sentence. The model writing your website is not trying to get you disciplined — it is trying to write persuasive copy, and persuasive copy about a lawyer is a regulated communication you are personally answerable for. The good news: the violations are predictable, they cluster into about a dozen phrases, and one pass catches nearly all of them.

The one rule everything else elaborates

ABA Model Rule 7.1 is two sentences long, and every other advertising rule in the book is an elaboration of it:

A lawyer shall not make a false or misleading communication about the lawyer or the
lawyer's services. A communication is false or misleading if it contains a material
misrepresentation of fact or law, or omits a fact necessary to make the statement
considered as a whole not materially misleading.

That is the entire rule. Note the second half — a statement that is perfectly true can still be misleading if it leaves out something that changes how a reasonable person reads it. Most website violations are not lies. They are true statements arranged to imply something bigger.

There is no “just marketing copy” zone

ABA Formal Opinion 10-457, Lawyer Websites (5 August 2010), is the ABA’s squarely-on-point statement about firm websites, and its structural holding is the thing to carry: everything on the site — the homepage, your bio, practice-area pages, blog posts, FAQ answers, what the chat widget says, the alt text on a photograph — is a communication about you and your services, governed by Rule 7.1. There is no back corner of the site where the rules stop applying.

The same opinion adds a maintenance duty most firms never think about: legal information on the site should be accurate and current, because content that was right in 2019 and is wrong now has quietly become misleading.

What the AI writes that breaks the rules

This is the heart of the lesson. Every item below is something a general-purpose model will produce unprompted from a brief as innocent as “write a homepage for my personal injury firm.” Read each row as a search term: find it on your site, then fix it.

Claims about you

The page itself

The form field that costs the most

In Module 5 you built a form that asks only what area of law the matter concerns, with a notice above the submit button and a checkbox. Here is why.

Model Rule 1.18 creates a category called a prospective client. Under comment [2], a consultation is likely to have occurred if a lawyer, in person or through advertising in any medium, “specifically requests or invites the submission of information about a potential representation without clear and reasonably understandable warnings and cautionary statements that limit the lawyer’s obligations, and a person provides information in response.” ABA Formal Opinion 10-457 applies that to websites in almost the same words.

A text box labeled “Tell us about your case” is precisely a request for information about a potential representation. Somebody you have never met, who may be the other side, types the facts of a matter into it at two in the morning. What follows is not a marketing problem:

• You owe duties under Rule 1.18(b) about information learned in that consultation.
• Rule 1.18(c) can disqualify you from a matter if you received information that could be significantly harmful to that person — and it is imputed across your whole firm.
• The escape hatch in Rule 1.18(d)(2) is demanding: reasonable measures to limit exposure, timely screening, no share of the fee, and prompt written notice.

The same comment [2] draws the safe side of the line clearly: a consultation does notoccur where a person provides information in response to advertising that merely describes the lawyer’s education, experience, areas of practice and contact information, or gives legal information of general interest.

The disclaimer pack

Formal Opinion 10-457 sets the standard every disclaimer has to meet. Limitations and disclaimers of a lawyer’s obligations are effective “only if reasonably understandable, properly placed, and not misleading,” requiring a clear warning in a readable format that a reasonable person can understand, placed conspicuously enough that the reader is likely to see it before proceeding.

And the sentence that matters most: a disclaimer “may be undercut if the lawyer acts or communicates contrary to its warning.” Disclaim confidentiality above your form and then reply substantively to what somebody sent through it, and the disclaimer has not saved you. A disclaimer mitigates. It does not immunize.

Before you send this form, please read: Sending this form does not create an
attorney-client relationship, and nothing you send through it is confidential or
protected by attorney-client privilege. Please do not send confidential information
or details about your legal matter until we have agreed in writing to represent you.
Submitting this form does not preserve or extend any legal deadline that may apply
to your situation.

Checking your own state — the method, not a list

Any state-by-state table published in a free course rots. Louisiana’s advertising rules changed in 2022, Texas’s current edition took effect on 7 March 2025, and the Florida Bar’s advertising handbook reached its thirteenth edition in December 2025 — all inside the window this lesson researched. So learn the method. It takes about half an hour, once.

• Search “[your state] rules of professional conduct 7.1” and read your 7.x series start to finish. It is short. Twenty minutes.
• Search your state bar’s own site for “advertising filing.” Some states require you to file with the bar and pay a fee; the amounts change without any rule amendment, so read the number off the bar’s current page rather than any article.
• Find your bar’s ethics hotline number and put it in your phone. Most bars run one free. Calling it is ordinary professional practice, not an admission of anything.
• Note which states your marketing actually reaches. Model Rule 8.5(b)(2) points at the jurisdiction where the predominant effect of the conduct is felt — so if you advertise across a state line, build to the stricter of the two.
• Check whether your state requires a label on the home page, a specific disclosure line, or record retention. Do not assume any of these are universal. None of them is.

Seven states were read against their primary sources for this course, in August 2026. Three of the seven require some kind of filing. Take the table below as an illustration of how far apart states sit — not as advice, and not as a substitute for reading yours.

The federal layer almost nobody in legal marketing mentions

Your state bar is not the only body with an opinion about what your website says about your clients. The FTC’s Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials, 16 C.F.R. Part 465, took effect on 21 October 2024 and applies to businesses generally — law firms included.

There is a collision here worth seeing, because two entirely separate bodies of law point the same way. ABA Formal Opinion 496 (13 January 2021), Responding to Online Criticism, holds that a negative online review alone does not satisfy the self-defense exception in Model Rule 1.6(b)(5), and that a lawyer who does respond online must not disclose information relating to a client’s representation. The Committee’s own best practice is that lawyers should give serious consideration tonot responding at all — which is the opposite of the generic advice every marketing guide gives. It supplies two sanctioned responses: an invitation to take the conversation offline, and this one, which you may copy exactly:

Professional obligations do not allow me to respond as I would wish.

Put the two together and the instinctive move — fire off a defamation threat at a one-star reviewer — is exposed under the ethics rules and under federal trade-practice law at the same time. Module 9 covers the review system itself; this is the rule underneath it.

What the rules say about the AI

You are building this site with a generative AI tool, so it is worth knowing exactly what has and has not been said about that.

• ABA Formal Opinion 512, Generative Artificial Intelligence Tools (29 July 2024). Its operative sentence: a lawyer’s reliance on, or submission of, an AI tool’s output without an appropriate degree of independent verification or review “could violate the duty to provide competent representation as required by Model Rule 1.1.” Note what that does and does not say. It is “could violate,” not “does.” It is the duty of competence under Rule 1.1, not malpractice — a distinction you will see collapsed constantly in AI commentary. And the opinion is explicitly a sliding scale: how much verification is appropriate depends on the tool and on the task it is doing.
• Opinion 512 does not reach your website. Its own footnote 4 says additional issues may surface including those found in Model Rule 7.1, and points the reader at Florida Opinion 24-1. So do not let anyone tell you the ABA has ruled on AI-written marketing copy. It has expressly parked the question.
• Florida Opinion 24-1 is the one squarely on-point AI authority, covered above. It binds Florida lawyers. Everywhere else it is the most careful available reasoning, and treating it as a floor is a defensible choice rather than a required one.
• If you advertise your use of AI, be careful how. Florida 24-1 permits it but bars a lawyer from claiming their AI is superior to the tools other lawyers or firms use unless the claim is objectively verifiable. And federally: in a final order approved by a 5-0 Commission vote on 16 January 2025, the FTC required DoNotPay to pay $193,000, to notify its 2021–2023 subscribers, and barred it from advertising that its service performs like a real lawyer without sufficient evidence.

Run the compliance check

The Build Kit carries a compliance-check skill: the checklist, the patterns above as detectors, and the placement map for disclaimers. It reads your running site and your site-architecture.md and reports what it found in plain sentences.

Run the compliance-check skill against my finished site — the closing step of Stage 5.

My state is [YOUR STATE]. I am licensed in [STATE(S)] and nowhere else. My practice
areas are [AREAS]. The certifications I actually hold are [NAME THE CERTIFYING
ORGANIZATION, or write "none"].

Go page by page through the running site and report, in plain sentences:
1. Every superlative, comparison, guarantee, urgency line or outcome promise, quoted
   with its page and a suggested replacement.
2. Every number, credential, award and case result, so I can verify each one against
   my own records — flag any you cannot trace to something I told you.
3. Every testimonial or review, and whether the site treats it as real and consented.
4. Every fee statement, and whether it says who is responsible for costs.
5. The contact form and any chat widget: field labels, the notice above the submit
   button, the checkbox, the deadline line, and what the widget says first.
6. Every place the site states or implies where I practice, against the states above.
7. Every statement of law on the site, listed separately so I can verify each one.
8. Required identifiers: a responsible lawyer named, real firm name, address and
   phone, and my licensed jurisdictions in the footer and on my bio.
9. Anything you think is a question for my state bar rather than for you.

Report first, change nothing until I say so, and be explicit about what you cannot
check.

The guardrail block — the highest-value paragraph in this course

Everything above is cleanup. This is prevention. Paste this at the top of any session where AI is going to write a word about you, and re-paste it whenever you open a new chat. It will not eliminate violations. It cuts how many the model produces, which means it cuts how much the audit has to catch.

CONTEXT AND HARD CONSTRAINTS — READ BEFORE WRITING ANYTHING

I am a licensed attorney and you are writing content for my law firm's website.
Everything you write is a regulated communication under my state's Rules of
Professional Conduct. If you break the rules below, I can be disciplined by my
state bar. Treat these as absolute constraints, not preferences.

MY FACTS (use only these — do not add, embellish, or infer any others):
- Name:
- Firm name:
- State(s) I am licensed in:
- Year admitted:
- Practice areas:
- Law school and year:
- Certifications I actually hold, and the exact name of the certifying
  organization (write "none" if none):
- Office address and phone:
- Anything else true about me I want on the site:

NEVER WRITE:
1. Superlatives or comparisons to other lawyers — no "best," "top," "leading,"
   "#1," "premier," "most experienced," "elite," "unmatched," "unlike other
   firms," or anything similar.
2. Any promise, guarantee, or prediction about outcomes — no "we get results,"
   "we'll get you the compensation you deserve," "we win."
3. Any urgency line implying the reader must act now or lose something.
4. Any number I did not give you — amounts recovered, success rates, case counts,
   client counts, years of experience, settlement figures. If a number would be
   useful, write [NUMBER NEEDED — VERIFY] instead.
5. Any testimonial, client quote, review, or case study. If the layout calls for
   one, write [TESTIMONIAL PLACEHOLDER — I WILL SUPPLY A REAL ONE OR DELETE].
6. Any credential, certification, award, membership, or honor I did not list
   above. Never write "board certified," "expert," or "specialist" unless I gave
   you the exact certifying organization.
7. Any city, county, or state I am not licensed in, and nothing implying national
   or multi-state practice.
8. Any statement of law — deadlines, damages caps, statutory elements, procedure —
   unless I explicitly ask. If I do ask, mark it [LEGAL STATEMENT — I MUST VERIFY]
   and tell me exactly what to check.
9. Any contact form field, label, or chat message inviting a visitor to describe
   their case or legal problem. Never "tell us about your case," "describe your
   legal issue," or anything similar.
10. Anything for a chat widget that answers a legal question or gives legal advice.
11. Any image prompt or description depicting a lawyer, staff member, or office as
    if it were mine.

ALWAYS DO:
- Prefer a verifiable fact over an adjective. "Handling family law in this county
  since 2011" beats "experienced family law attorney."
- Put a prior-results disclaimer in the same block as any result I give you.
- If you mention my fees at all, say whether the client may be responsible for
  costs and expenses in addition to the fee.
- Label the contact form's open field to ask only what area of law the matter
  concerns — never for the facts.
- Above the form's submit button, include a notice that sending the form does not
  create an attorney-client relationship, is not confidential, and does not
  preserve any legal deadline.
- Put my licensed jurisdiction(s) in the footer and on my bio, and my firm name,
  real address and phone in the footer.
- Flag your own uncertainty. If you are not certain something is true about me,
  write [VERIFY] beside it rather than guessing.

BEFORE YOU FINISH:
List every claim you made about me that I have not personally confirmed in this
conversation. If that list is not empty, you have broken rule 4, 5, or 6 — fix it.

Save a dated archive copy

Some states require it. New York requires a copy of the site to be preserved on initial publication, on any major redesign or meaningful content change, and never less than every 90 days. Missouri requires two years of advertising records. Louisiana requires five years for advertisements that must be filed — whether that duty reaches a website exempt from filing is not something the rule states, which is itself a reason to keep the copy.

Everywhere else it is simply the only way to prove, later, what your site actually said on a given day. It costs five minutes.

1. Ask Claude to save a snapshot of the finished site — that preserves the code.
2. Open the live site and print each significant page to PDF: home, every practice-area page, every bio, the contact page, the disclaimer page. Use your browser’s Print → Save as PDF.
3. Put them in one folder named with today’s date, in the format 2026-08-26-site-archive, so the folders sort themselves chronologically forever.
4. Store it where your firm stores records — not only on the laptop you built the site on.
5. Put a recurring reminder in your calendar. Every 90 days: re-archive, and re-read this lesson’s checklist.

The preparation list

This is not a gate and nobody is signing it off. It is the list of what to check before you publish, and what to ask your bar about if a line of it is unclear for your state.

• I have read my own state’s 7.x rules once, start to finish, and I know whether my state requires filing.
• Every sentence on the site is something I could produce evidence for on demand.
• Every number, credential, admission and award came from my own records — not from the model.
• Nothing on the site says best, top, leading, premier, unmatched, or compares me to other lawyers.
• Nothing promises or predicts an outcome, and nothing manufactures a deadline.
• Every result carries a prior-results disclaimer in the same block, and every fee statement says who pays costs.
• Every testimonial is real, consented to, and unpaid — or discloses that it was not.
• The form asks only what area of law the matter concerns; the notice sits above the submit button with a checkbox; the deadline line is there.
• Any chat widget identifies itself, answers no legal questions, and carries the same warning first.
• Every place the site names is somewhere I am actually admitted, and the footer says where I am licensed.
• Every statement of law on the site has been checked by me against the current statute or rule.
• A responsible lawyer, the real firm name, a real address and a real phone number appear on the site.
• I know whether my state wants a label or a specific disclosure line on the home page.
• A dated archive copy is saved, and the 90-day reminder is in my calendar.
• I have re-read the site as the person on the other side of a bar complaint would, and fixed the one sentence they would screenshot.