Short answer: Iowa attorney advertising is governed by Rules 32:7.1 through 32:7.3 of the Iowa Rules of Professional Conduct, with the Iowa Supreme Court Attorney Disciplinary Board handling enforcement. Iowa adopted the modernised structure, so two rules other states still cite were reserved. But the provision that matters most to anyone who did not write their own website is rule 32:7.2(d), which requires every communication about a lawyer’s services to carry the name and contact information of at least one lawyer or law firm responsible for its content. This guide sets out the Iowa attorney advertising rules that apply to a law firm website, and to the question of who answers for what is on it.
Your web designer wrote most of your website. Iowa’s rule asks whose name is on it.
The sentence most agencies have never read
Rule 32:7.2(d) is one line long and it does two things at once. It requires identification — a name and contact information, which the rule’s commentary indicates may be a website address, a telephone number, an email address or a physical location. And it attaches that identification to a specific idea: responsibility for the content.
Most firms read this as a footer requirement and stop. It is not really a footer requirement. It is an allocation of accountability, and it is written on the assumption that a lawyer stands behind every claim made in the firm’s name.
That assumption is worth sitting with, because on a typical law firm website it is not true. The practice area pages were drafted by a copywriter working from a competitor’s site. The homepage headline came out of a positioning workshop. The blog runs on a monthly content retainer. The meta descriptions were generated. The badges in the footer were added by whoever built the theme. No lawyer has read some of it since launch, and a good deal of it was never read by a lawyer at all.
Iowa is explicit that hiring an agency is fine
It is worth being clear about what the rule does not say, because agencies are sometimes vague about this in a self-serving direction and firms are sometimes anxious about it in the other.
The commentary to rule 32:7.2 states plainly that a lawyer may compensate employees, agents and vendors engaged to provide marketing or client development services, and it lists the categories — publicists, public relations personnel, business development staff, broadcast station employees and spokespersons, and website designers. Paying a web designer is paying the reasonable costs of advertising. It is not paying someone for a recommendation.
So the arrangement is permitted, and Iowa says so in as many words. What the rule declines to do is let the arrangement move the responsibility. You can delegate the drafting. You cannot delegate the answering.
Two rules that no longer exist
Iowa amended this part of its rules effective 1 January 2021, in the direction the ABA took in 2018. Rule 32:7.1 remains the general prohibition on false or misleading communications. Rule 32:7.2 was retitled “Communications Concerning a Lawyer’s Services: Specific Rules” and absorbed the substance of what used to sit elsewhere. Rule 32:7.3 covers solicitation of clients. Rule 32:7.6 covers political contributions.
Rules 32:7.4 and 32:7.5 are marked RESERVED. The specialisation rule and the firm names and letterheads rule are gone as free-standing provisions. Their subject matter did not disappear — firm names and professional designations are addressed in the commentary to 32:7.1, and certification claims in 32:7.2(c) — but the rule numbers are empty.
This matters for a practical reason. A compliance checklist keyed to “Rule 7.5” will look at Iowa, find nothing, and report nothing. It will not report a gap, because from the checklist’s point of view there is no rule to check. Firm name and trade name questions in Iowa are live questions; they are simply filed somewhere a national template does not look. We made the same point in our Maryland guide, where the mechanism is different and the failure mode is identical.
Who actually answers for each part of a website
The useful exercise is to go through the site element by element and separate three things that get conflated: who drafted it, who approved it, and who answers for it if a grievance arrives.
| Website element | Usually drafted by | Who answers for it |
|---|---|---|
| Homepage headline | Agency or copywriter | The firm |
| Practice area pages | Agency or copywriter | The firm |
| Attorney biographies | The lawyer, edited by the agency | The firm |
| Blog and articles | Content retainer | The firm |
| Case results and testimonials | Firm supplies, agency formats | The firm |
| Title tags and meta descriptions | SEO tooling, often automated | The firm |
| Badges, awards and seals | Whoever built the theme | The firm |
| Ad copy and landing pages | Agency | The firm |
The right-hand column does not vary, and that is the entire point of the table. Every disagreement about scope, every “we assumed you had reviewed that”, every generated meta description nobody looked at — all of it lands in one column, and the rule tells you which.
What a workable review process looks like
Firms that handle this well do not review everything. They decide in advance which categories of content require a lawyer’s sign-off before publication and which do not, and they write that down.
A reasonable split: anything making a claim about outcomes, experience, credentials, comparative quality or scope of practice is read by a lawyer before it goes live. Anything purely navigational or descriptive is not. The category most often missed is the one no human composes — automatically generated page titles, descriptions and structured data, which are communications about the lawyer’s services whether or not anybody drafted them deliberately.
The second half is a re-read schedule. Content does not stay accurate on its own. A biography written when someone was three years qualified is a false statement about experience five years later, in the ordinary direction of understating it, and the same mechanism runs the other way when a practice area is quietly dropped but its page stays up.
If you are choosing a vendor, this is a fair thing to ask about directly. Our guide to choosing a web designer for your law firm covers the questions that separate an agency that has read the rules from one that has heard of them.
Iowa attorney advertising rules: frequently asked questions
Which rules govern attorney advertising in Iowa?
Chapter 32 of the Iowa Court Rules, the Iowa Rules of Professional Conduct, principally rules 32:7.1 (communications concerning a lawyer’s services), 32:7.2 (specific rules) and 32:7.3 (solicitation of clients), with rule 32:7.6 covering political contributions. Enforcement runs through the Iowa Supreme Court Attorney Disciplinary Board.
Why are Iowa rules 32:7.4 and 32:7.5 empty?
Iowa reserved both when it restructured this part of the rules effective 1 January 2021. The subject matter moved rather than disappeared — certification claims are addressed within rule 32:7.2 and firm name questions within the commentary to rule 32:7.1. Checklists keyed to the old numbers will silently skip Iowa.
Can an Iowa lawyer pay a web designer or marketing agency?
Yes. The commentary to rule 32:7.2 expressly contemplates compensating vendors engaged to provide marketing or client development services, and names website designers among them. What the rule does not do is transfer responsibility for the content to the vendor.
Does every page need contact information, or just the homepage?
Rule 32:7.2(d) attaches to the communication, and a landing page or standalone microsite is arguably its own communication rather than part of the website it resembles. How that applies to a particular page structure is a question worth putting to your ethics counsel rather than resolving from a template.
Does Iowa require advertising to be filed or retained?
This guide does not state Iowa’s current filing or record-retention position, because requirements of that kind change and are easy to describe out of date. Confirm with the Iowa Supreme Court Attorney Disciplinary Board or your ethics counsel.
Iowa attorney advertising rules: the short version
If you take one thing from this guide, take this: open your own website and find a page nobody at the firm has read since it was published. There is almost always one, and it is usually a practice area page or an old blog post. Under Iowa’s rules a lawyer is responsible for its content whether or not a lawyer wrote it, approved it, or knows it exists. That is a fixable problem, and the fix starts with an inventory rather than a redesign.
Official source: the Iowa Judicial Branch.
Legal Web Agency is a marketing agency, not a law firm, and nothing here is legal advice. Nothing here states that any particular page, vendor arrangement or review process satisfies Iowa’s rules. Confirm current requirements with the Iowa Supreme Court Attorney Disciplinary Board or your ethics counsel.
Related reading: Attorney Advertising Rules by State, plus the Maryland, Nebraska and Kansas guides.
