Short answer: Maine attorney advertising is governed by Rules 7.1 through 7.6 of the Maine Rules of Professional Conduct, adopted effective 1 August 2009, with the Board of Overseers of the Bar handling regulation and discipline. Maine also has something no other state has in quite this form: Rule 7.2-A, “Aspirational Goals for Lawyer Advertising” — a rule that sits inside the conduct rules, is numbered like an obligation, and is not one. This guide sets out the Maine attorney advertising rules that apply to a law firm website, and makes a case for taking seriously the one rule you cannot be disciplined for breaking.
Maine wrote down what it hopes lawyers will do, and then declined to require it. That is more interesting than it sounds.
Where 7.2-A came from
Maine’s preamble explains the lineage. Two sets of aspirational goals previously sat in the Maine Bar Rules — one on pro bono service, one on the substance and style of lawyer advertising. When Maine adopted its Rules of Professional Conduct in 2009 both were carried across: pro bono into Rule 6.1, advertising into Rule 7.2-A.
So the placement is deliberate. Maine could have dropped the advertising goals, or relegated them to a preface. It put them in the numbered sequence, immediately after the advertising rule, where every lawyer reading Rule 7.2 will encounter them.
The result is a two-layer structure that is unusually honest about something every state is actually doing. Rules 7.1 and 7.3 are enforceable. Rule 7.2-A describes what the profession would like advertising to look like, and admits that this is a hope rather than a command.
The two layers, and why the gap exists
The gap between them is not an oversight. It is a constitutional fact. Lawyer advertising is commercial speech, and a state’s power to restrict it on grounds of dignity, taste or tone is limited in ways its power to prohibit misleading claims is not. Every bar in the country has views about advertising it cannot enforce. Most leave those views implicit, expressed through the way rules are applied. Maine wrote them down and labelled them accurately.
That labelling is useful to a firm building a website, because it separates two questions that firms routinely run together.
| Question | Governed by | Consequence of getting it wrong |
|---|---|---|
| Is this claim misleading? | Rule 7.1 | Disciplinary |
| Is this solicitation improper? | Rule 7.3 | Disciplinary |
| Does this firm name mislead? | Rule 7.5 | Disciplinary |
| Is this advertising dignified? | Rule 7.2-A | None, formally |
| Would a referring lawyer wince? | Nothing | Referrals |
| Would a judge remember it? | Nothing | Reputation |
The bottom half of that table has no formal consequence and, in a state the size of Maine, considerable practical consequence. That is the argument for 7.2-A, and it is a commercial argument rather than a compliance one.
Small bar, long memory
Maine has a comparatively small bar spread over a large state, and a legal market where a meaningful share of good work arrives by referral from other lawyers. In that setting, the audience for your website is not only prospective clients. It is also the lawyer in another county deciding whether to send you a case, and opposing counsel forming a view of who they are dealing with.
This changes the calculation on the elements that Rule 7.1 permits but 7.2-A would rather you did not use. The aggressive superlative, the dramatised imagery, the copy written to sound like a national television advertisement — these are lawful, and in a market where your referral sources will see them they carry a cost that does not appear in any conversion report.
It is worth being precise about the failure mode, because it is not usually a firm deciding to be crass. It is a firm buying a template built for a metropolitan personal injury market and not adjusting the register. The template is doing what it was designed for. It was designed for somewhere else.
What this means for the build
Practically, treat Rule 7.2-A as a second review pass with a different reader in mind. The first pass asks whether anything on the page is misleading — that is Rule 7.1, it is enforceable, and it is not optional. The second pass asks how the page reads to a lawyer who might refer you work.
The elements that most often fail the second pass are the ones that were bought rather than written: the stock hero image of a gavel, the aggressive headline that came with the theme, the badge row, the countdown on the consultation form. Our guide to law firm website content works through the register question directly, and it is the same problem approached from the copy side.
One caution worth stating plainly: aspirational does not mean advisory in the sense of “ignorable”, and it certainly does not soften Rules 7.1, 7.3, 7.4, 7.5 or 7.6, which are ordinary enforceable rules. Maine has a full set of them and the Board of Overseers enforces them. The claim here is narrower — that Maine tells you which layer is which, and most states do not.
Maine attorney advertising rules: frequently asked questions
Which rules govern attorney advertising in Maine?
The Maine Rules of Professional Conduct, effective 1 August 2009: Rule 7.1 (communications concerning a lawyer’s services), 7.2 (advertising), 7.2-A (aspirational goals for lawyer advertising), 7.3 (direct contact with prospective clients), 7.4 (communication of field of practice and specialization), 7.5 (firm names and letterheads) and 7.6 (political contributions to obtain legal engagements or appointments by judges). Regulation and discipline run through the Board of Overseers of the Bar.
Is Rule 7.2-A enforceable?
It is framed as aspirational rather than mandatory, which is why it is titled the way it is. That framing does not extend to the surrounding rules, and how the Board treats 7.2-A in any particular context is a question for the Board and your ethics counsel rather than for a marketing agency.
Why would a firm follow a rule it cannot be disciplined for breaking?
Because the consequences are commercial rather than disciplinary. In a small bar where referrals matter, the view other lawyers take of your marketing is a business input, and it is one your analytics will never show you.
Does Maine restrict what a firm can be called?
Rule 7.5 addresses firm names and letterheads, and firm and trade name questions carry through to domain names, which are read as a name before anything else on the site. We worked that through in the Alabama guide; Maine’s current position on any specific name is for the Board of Overseers or your counsel.
Does Maine require advertising to be filed or retained?
This guide does not state Maine’s current filing or record-retention position, because requirements of that kind change and are easy to describe out of date. Confirm with the Board of Overseers of the Bar or your ethics counsel.
Maine attorney advertising rules: the short version
If you take one thing from this guide, take this: send your homepage to a lawyer in another firm whose opinion you value and ask what it tells them about you. That is not a compliance test and it will not keep you out of trouble with the Board. It is the test Rule 7.2-A is actually describing, and in Maine it is probably worth more to your practice than the conversion rate is.
Official source: the Board of Overseers of the Bar.
Legal Web Agency is a marketing agency, not a law firm, and nothing here is legal advice. Nothing here states how the Board of Overseers treats Rule 7.2-A in any given case, or that any particular page satisfies Maine’s enforceable rules. Confirm current requirements with the Board of Overseers of the Bar or your ethics counsel.
Related reading: Attorney Advertising Rules by State, plus the New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Alabama guides.
