Short answer: West Virginia attorney advertising is governed by Rules 7.1 through 7.5 of the West Virginia Rules of Professional Conduct, comprehensively amended in 2014 and effective 1 January 2015, with the Office of Lawyer Disciplinary Counsel and the Lawyer Disciplinary Board handling enforcement. West Virginia kept in its black-letter text two prohibitions that many states have since moved into commentary or dropped: communications likely to create an unjustified expectation about results, and comparisons with other lawyers’ services that cannot be factually substantiated. This guide sets out the West Virginia attorney advertising rules that apply to a law firm website, and to the two pages those provisions land on hardest: results and “why choose us”.
Every firm wants a results page. West Virginia’s rule text is unusually direct about what one is allowed to do.
Why the drafting matters
When the ABA revised its model rules in 2018, a good deal of specificity moved out of the rules and into comments, on the view that the general prohibition on misleading communications does the work. Plenty of states followed. West Virginia’s current text, adopted in 2014, predates that shift and retains the older, more explicit formulation.
The practical difference is not that West Virginia is stricter in outcome — a misleading results page is a problem everywhere. The difference is that in West Virginia you do not have to reason your way from a general standard to a specific conclusion about verdict pages. The rule names the category.
That makes it a useful state in which to think the problem through properly, and the analysis transfers.
The results page, element by element
A results page is a set of true statements arranged to support an inference. The statements are usually accurate. The inference is the regulated part.
The number by itself. “$2.4 million — motor vehicle collision.” Accurate, and almost content-free. The reader cannot tell whether the recovery reflects the injury, the policy limits, the liability picture or the work. What they take from it is a sense of what happens when you hire this firm.
The totals. “Over $50 million recovered.” A cumulative figure over an unstated period, usually including matters handled with co-counsel and sometimes at a prior firm. Each of those qualifications is material and none of them is visible.
The selection. Ten cases on a page and no denominator. This is the same structural issue as a curated testimonial wall: the individual entries are true and the set is an argument.
The unstated variables. Settlements before fees and costs. Gross rather than net. Structured settlements quoted at their full payout value. Cases where the reported figure was reduced on appeal, or was a policy limit that any competent lawyer would have obtained.
The staleness. A results page is usually built once and appended to. The oldest entries are frequently the largest, which means the page’s most prominent claims describe the firm as it was rather than as it is.
Comparative claims, which are a separate problem
The second provision is about comparison, and it sets an evidentiary standard rather than a taste standard: a comparison must be capable of factual substantiation.
This is worth separating from the results question because firms tend to treat “we get better outcomes” as marketing tone rather than as an assertion. Under this drafting it is an assertion, and the test is whether you could show your working.
| Claim on the page | What it asserts | Can it be substantiated? |
|---|---|---|
| “Founded in 1994” | A date | Yes, from records |
| “Tried more than 60 cases to verdict” | A count | Yes, if counted |
| “More trial experience than most firms in the region” | A comparison | Requires data on other firms |
| “The best personal injury lawyers in Charleston” | A ranking | No |
| “We recover more than the big advertisers” | A comparison | No |
| “$2.4m recovered in a 2019 collision case” | A single result | Yes, with context |
The pattern in the third column is worth noting: claims about yourself are usually substantiable, and claims about your position relative to others usually are not, because you do not have the other firms’ data. That is a workable rule of thumb for a copy review, and it costs you less than it sounds — a specific count of trials is more persuasive than a superlative anyway.
Building a results page that survives review
The firms that get this right tend to do three things. They give each result enough context that the reader can see why the number is what it is — injury, liability, insurance position, what was disputed. They state what the figures are: gross or net, this firm or with co-counsel, the period the totals cover. And they date the entries, which solves the staleness problem and incidentally makes the page more credible rather than less.
The disclaimer question sits separately, and this guide deliberately does not tell you what to write. Prescribed wording varies by state, changes, and is the expensive thing to get wrong from a template — a point we develop in the Missouri guide, where verbatim disclaimers are a distinct engineering problem. Confirm what West Virginia currently expects with the Office of Lawyer Disciplinary Counsel or your ethics counsel, and treat a disclaimer as something that supplements adequate context rather than substituting for it.
West Virginia attorney advertising rules: frequently asked questions
Which rules govern attorney advertising in West Virginia?
The West Virginia Rules of Professional Conduct, Rules 7.1 (communications concerning a lawyer’s services), 7.2 (advertising), 7.3 (solicitation of clients), 7.4 (communication of fields of practice and specialization) and 7.5 (firm names and letterheads), in the version effective 1 January 2015. Enforcement runs through the Office of Lawyer Disciplinary Counsel and the Lawyer Disciplinary Board.
Can a West Virginia law firm publish past case results?
Past results are not prohibited as a category. The rule addresses communications likely to create an unjustified expectation about results the lawyer can achieve, which is a question about how the results are presented and what context accompanies them. Whether a particular page crosses that line is for the Office of Lawyer Disciplinary Counsel and your ethics counsel.
Is “best lawyer” language a problem in West Virginia?
The rule text addresses comparisons with other lawyers’ services that cannot be factually substantiated. A superlative is a comparison, and the substantiation question is whether you hold data about the lawyers you are comparing yourself to.
What about awards and rankings that make the comparison for you?
Displaying a third-party rating raises a related question about what the badge implies and what methodology sits behind it. We covered the strictest end of that spectrum in our New Jersey guide; West Virginia’s position on any specific badge is a question for your ethics counsel.
Does West Virginia require advertising to be filed or retained?
This guide does not state West Virginia’s current filing or record-retention position, because requirements of that kind change and are easy to describe out of date. Confirm with the Office of Lawyer Disciplinary Counsel or your ethics counsel.
West Virginia attorney advertising rules: the short version
If you take one thing from this guide, take this: go to your results page and pick the largest number on it. Can you say, in one sentence, why that case produced that figure? If you can, the entry is doing its job. If the honest answer is that the policy limits were high and liability was never really in dispute, the number on its own is carrying an implication the case does not support — and adding the sentence fixes it.
Official source: the West Virginia Judiciary.
Legal Web Agency is a marketing agency, not a law firm, and nothing here is legal advice. Nothing here states what disclaimer wording West Virginia requires, or that any particular results page or comparative claim is permitted. Confirm current requirements with the Office of Lawyer Disciplinary Counsel or your ethics counsel.
Related reading: Attorney Advertising Rules by State, plus the New Jersey, Missouri and New Mexico guides.
