Lawyers in the United States started advertising in 1977, after the Supreme Court ruled in Bates v. State Bar of Arizona that truthful attorney advertising is protected by the First Amendment. Before that decision, state bar rules had banned almost all forms of legal advertising for close to seventy years, limiting lawyers to a shingle outside the office and a plain business card.
The Ban That Stood for Almost Seventy Years
The American Bar Association adopted its first ethics code, the Canons of Professional Ethics, in 1908. Canon 27 took direct aim at advertising, declaring that “solicitation of business by circulars or advertisements, or by personal communications or interviews, not warranted by personal relations, is unprofessional.” The canon called indirect self-promotion through newspaper coverage of a lawyer’s cases “intolerable” and said the only worthy advertisement was “the establishment of a well-merited reputation for professional capacity and fidelity to trust.”1American Bar Association. Canons of Professional Ethics
State bars enforced that posture throughout the twentieth century. When the ABA replaced the 1908 Canons with the Code of Professional Responsibility, the basic prohibition carried over.2Legal Information Institute. Code of Professional Responsibility The stated reason was dignity: lawyers were expected to stand apart from the marketplace, and advertising was treated as the work of hucksters, not professionals. A lawyer who placed a newspaper ad could be disciplined, suspended, or disbarred.
The Constitutional Groundwork: Virginia Pharmacy (1976)
The year before lawyers won the right to advertise, the Supreme Court decided a case about pharmacists that made the outcome in Bates almost inevitable. Virginia had made it a crime for pharmacists to advertise prescription drug prices. In Virginia State Board of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, the Court struck down that law, holding that “speech which does ‘no more than propose a commercial transaction'” is still protected by the First Amendment.3Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Virginia State Board of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, 425 U.S. 748 (1976)
The decision was grounded in the consumer’s interest in truthful information. A state could not suppress accurate pricing simply because it worried about the effect that information might have. The opinion said nothing about lawyers, but the logic was impossible to confine to pharmacies.
Bates v. State Bar of Arizona
John Bates and Van O’Steen ran a legal clinic in Phoenix built around affordable, routine legal services for people of moderate income. The business depended on volume, so they placed a newspaper ad in the Arizona Republic listing fixed fees for uncontested divorces, simple bankruptcies, name changes, and uncontested adoptions. Arizona’s disciplinary rules flatly prohibited newspaper advertising by attorneys, and the state bar filed a complaint.4Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Bates v. State Bar of Arizona, 433 U.S. 350 (1977)
The Supreme Court ruled for Bates and O’Steen. Writing for the majority, Justice Blackmun applied the commercial speech principles from the Virginia Pharmacy case and rejected the state’s justifications for a blanket ban. Advertising routine legal services, the Court said, is “not inherently misleading” because fixed rates for those services can be meaningfully established. Claims that lawyer advertising would undermine professionalism or stir up unnecessary litigation did not carry enough weight to override First Amendment protection.4Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Bates v. State Bar of Arizona, 433 U.S. 350 (1977)
The holding was deliberately narrow. The Court decided only that lawyers could advertise the prices of routine services. It left open questions about advertising claims of quality, in-person solicitation, and other forms of promotion, and it acknowledged that states could still regulate advertising to prevent false or misleading claims.5Oyez. Bates v. State Bar of Arizona The core principle, though, was unambiguous: a blanket ban on truthful lawyer advertising violates the First Amendment.
What Lawyers Still Can’t Do
Bates opened the door to advertising, but it did not open the door to every form of client outreach. A lawyer who buys a billboard is advertising; a lawyer who walks into a hospital room to pitch an accident victim is doing something else.
The Supreme Court drew that line a year later in Ohralik v. Ohio State Bar Association. A lawyer there had personally approached two young women injured in a car accident, visiting one in the hospital, to sign them as clients. The Court unanimously upheld Ohio’s discipline. A newspaper ad or a website, the opinion explained, “simply provides information and leaves the recipient free to act upon it or not.” An in-person pitch from a trained advocate “may exert pressure, and often demands an immediate response, without providing an opportunity for comparison or reflection.”6Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Ohralik v. Ohio State Bar Association, 436 U.S. 447 (1978) States do not have to prove actual harm from a solicitation; the risk of overreaching and undue influence is enough to justify a flat ban on live, person-to-person solicitation for financial gain.7Oyez. Ohralik v. Ohio State Bar Association
That distinction still governs. The ABA’s Model Rule 7.3 prohibits live solicitation when the lawyer’s significant motive is financial gain, with narrow exceptions for other lawyers, close personal relationships, and people who routinely use the type of legal service being offered.8American Bar Association. Rule 7.3 Solicitation of Clients Written contact like letters and emails carries less coercive force and gets more room, though it is not unlimited. Florida, for instance, bars lawyers from sending targeted mail to accident victims and their families within 30 days of the accident, and the Supreme Court upheld that rule in Florida Bar v. Went For It as a narrowly tailored way to protect the privacy of people recovering from traumatic events.9Legal Information Institute. Florida Bar v. Went For It, Inc., 515 U.S. 618 (1995) Several states have adopted similar cooling-off periods.
How Legal Advertising Grew After 1977
The first wave of post-Bates ads was modest. Lawyers placed small listings in newspapers and the Yellow Pages, giving a name, practice areas, and sometimes a fee schedule. Television arrived in the 1980s and produced the personal-injury commercials that became a cultural fixture. Radio followed the same pattern.
The internet changed everything again. Law firm websites, search engine ads, and social media now account for the bulk of legal marketing. A lawyer in a mid-size city might buy Google ads keyed to searches like “car accident attorney near me,” run a blog built for search rankings, and collect client reviews across several platforms. None of this existed when Bates was decided, and all of it falls under the same constitutional rule the Court announced that year: advertising must be truthful and not misleading.
Client testimonials and online reviews have added a modern complication. Most states allow them under Rule 7.1 as long as they are truthful and not deceptive, but the line between a client describing their experience and a client making a comparative quality claim gets drawn differently in different states. Ads that feature specific case results typically have to carry a disclaimer noting that individual outcomes depend on the facts of each case.
Nearly fifty years after Bates, the pattern is steady. Every new medium gets folded into the same framework, and the constitutional floor has not moved. States can require truthfulness, mandate disclosures, and restrict coercive in-person solicitation. What they cannot do, since 1977, is stop lawyers from telling the public what services they offer and what those services cost.