Key Takeaways
- SB 37 has been in force since January 1, 2026. It amends seven sections of California's Business and Professions Code and adds one new one.
- Your website is an advertisement. The statutory definition covers any electronic communication that provides information about a lawyer's services for the purpose of encouraging someone to hire them. That is a homepage, a practice-area page, a landing page, a paid search ad, and a paid social ad.
- Every ad needs a name and a place. The lawyer's or firm's name, plus the city, town, or county of at least one bona fide office — or the address of record on file with the State Bar.
- New section 6156.5 creates a private right of action with statutory damages of $5,000 to $100,000 per violation, or three times actual damages, whichever is larger.
- Your vendor is not a shield. Content produced by a marketing agency, a referral service, or a directory you participate in is your problem now.
Statutory damages under California's new attorney advertising law start at $5,000 per violation and run to $100,000. Not per campaign. Per violation. And the thing most likely to generate one is not a billboard or a late-night TV spot — it is a page on your own website that a marketing vendor wrote for you eighteen months ago and nobody has read since.
SB 37 was signed on October 11, 2025 and took effect January 1, 2026. Seven months in, we are still auditing California firm websites that have not changed a word. This is what the law reaches, where it bites on a website specifically, and what a compliance pass actually looks like.
This is a marketing analysis, not legal advice. We build and audit law firm websites; we do not practise law. Every firm should run its own advertising review past its own counsel or the State Bar's ethics resources.
What SB 37 Actually Changed
The bill — Chapter 645, Statutes of 2025 — amends Business and Professions Code sections 6153, 6155, 6157, 6157.2, 6158.4, 6158.5 and 6158.7, and adds section 6156.5. Three changes matter more than the rest.
The definition of "advertisement" got wide. Wide enough that the old mental model — advertising is the stuff you buy media for — no longer works.
"Any communication, through any written, recorded, or electronic means, whether available to, or directed generally to, members of the public or to a limited group of individuals, that provides information concerning a lawyer or the lawyer's services for the purpose of encouraging individuals to secure the services of the lawyer or their law firm."
— SB 37, amending Business and Professions Code § 6157
Read that against your own site. A practice-area page describing what your firm handles, written to make a reader call you, sits inside that definition. So does the Google Ads headline pointing at it. So does the profile a directory maintains on your behalf.
Disclosure became mandatory and specific. Advertisements must conspicuously display the lawyer's or law firm's name and the city, town, or county of at least one bona fide office location — or the address of record listed with the State Bar. "Bona fide" is doing real work in that sentence. A mail-drop suite number in a metro you have never physically staffed is exactly the arrangement the legislature was looking at.
Section 6156.5 handed enforcement to the public. Before, an advertising problem was a State Bar matter. Now any person may bring a civil action for a violation of section 6155 and recover statutory damages between $5,000 and $100,000 per violation, or triple actual damages — whichever is larger. That changes who is watching. Competitors are watching. Plaintiffs' firms are watching.
Where It Bites on a Law Firm Website
Most compliance write-ups stop at the statute. Here is the translation into page elements, because that is where the exposure actually lives.
| Page element | What the statute reaches | What to do about it |
|---|---|---|
| Homepage hero | Outcome language — "we win", "maximum compensation", "you don't pay unless we win" without the full fee explanation | Replace promises with descriptions. What you do, for whom, where. |
| Footer / contact block | Required name + office city, town or county disclosure | Put it in the global footer so every page inherits it, including landing pages. |
| City and neighborhood pages | Implying an office where there isn't a bona fide one | Serve the market honestly: name the office you actually have and describe the area you cover from it. |
| "Awards" and badge rows | Recognition from organizations that charge a membership or listing fee | Audit each badge for what it cost. Drop the pay-to-play ones. |
| Results / case-results pages | Statements about record and experience that could mislead | Keep the numbers, add the context and the disclaimer that past results don't predict future ones. |
| Paid search and paid social ads | Same definition, same disclosure duty, plus auto-generated ad copy | Review generated headlines and assets on a schedule, not at launch only. |
| Directory profiles and lead-gen landing pages | Third-party content published to promote you | Inventory every one. You are answerable for copy you never saw. |
The badge row is the one that surprises people. A great many California firm homepages carry four to eight recognition seals, and a meaningful share of those come from organizations whose business model is selling the seal. Under SB 37 that is not a taste question anymore.
Your Marketing Vendor Is Not a Liability Shield
This is the provision with the longest tail. Attorneys can no longer put distance between themselves and the people who market for them. Copy produced by an agency, a referral service, or a directory you participate in is treated as yours — and both the firm and the individual lawyers can be on the hook when a vendor overstates something on a landing page you never opened.
For firms that bought marketing on a hands-off arrangement, this is a genuine change in risk. The three questions worth asking your provider this month:
- Give me the full inventory. Every live URL, every directory profile, every landing page, every active ad — including the ones on domains you own rather than ours.
- Who reviews generated copy, and how often? If any part of the ad account writes its own headlines, someone has to read them on a schedule. We walked through that specific exposure in our breakdown of Google's AI Max migration for attorney ad accounts.
- Which claims on this site can you substantiate? Not "which sound fine" — which can be evidenced if someone files.
A provider who cannot produce that inventory inside a week does not know what it has published in your name. That is a finding in itself, and it is one of the reasons we publish our own engagements with named firms and stated measurement windows rather than round numbers with no source attached.
The Part Where AI Walks Into This
Two currents are running straight at each other, and California firms are standing where they meet.
The first: generated copy is now everywhere in legal marketing. Ad platforms assemble headlines from landing pages. Content tools draft practice-area pages. None of these systems knows what section 6157.2 prohibits, and none of them will be the respondent.
The second: AI answer engines are increasingly the first thing a potential client reads. When someone asks an assistant to recommend a firm, the model synthesizes an answer from whatever it has ingested — including your outcome claims and your badge row. Content written to impress a language model and content written to survive a compliance review are not automatically the same document. Getting AI marketing for California law firms right now means writing for both readers at once.
The good news is that they converge more than they conflict. Specific, verifiable, well-sourced writing is what AI systems cite and what compliance reviews survive. Vague superlatives fail both. "We are the best injury lawyers in California" is simultaneously a compliance problem and a sentence no answer engine has any reason to quote. "Our office is in Sherman Oaks, we handle rideshare collision claims across the San Fernando Valley, and here is how the process works" is neither.
A Compliance Pass You Can Run This Week
Not a legal review — that is your counsel's job. A marketing-side sweep that finds the obvious exposure before someone else does.
- Crawl your own site and list every page a prospective client can land on. Most firms discover pages they forgot they had. Old campaign landing pages are the usual offenders.
- Search for guarantee language. Grep the copy for "guarantee", "we win", "maximum", "no fee unless", "best", "top-rated", "#1". Read every hit in context.
- Check the disclosure on every template, not just the homepage. Landing pages built outside the main site template are where the required name-and-office block goes missing.
- Price every badge. If the organization charges for membership or for the listing, treat the seal as suspect.
- Pull the third-party inventory. Every directory, every referral service, every co-branded page. Read what they say about you.
- Read your live ads, not your ad settings. Generated assets change. What ran last quarter is not what is running today.
- Then hand the list to your lawyer. Marketing finds the candidates; counsel makes the call.
If you would rather see the machine-readable picture first — what your site currently says about your firm, and how AI systems are summarizing it — our free AI visibility audit shows you the claims and citations your pages are actually generating.
Why This Is Also an Opportunity
Here is the part nobody frames correctly. A statute that forces specificity is a gift to firms that were already specific.
The generic California injury site — stock hero, superlative headline, eight badges, no office named — is now both a compliance liability and a page with nothing citable on it. The firm that names its office, describes its actual practice, and evidences its claims has a page that satisfies section 6157 and gives Google and every answer engine something concrete to work with. The same edit fixes both problems.
Reviews are the clearest example. Firms have spent years chasing volume. Under a regime that scrutinizes claims about skill and record, a body of genuine, specific client reviews is worth considerably more than a purchased seal — and it is already one of the strongest local ranking signals available to a California firm. Compliance and visibility pulling in the same direction is not the usual state of affairs. Take it.
Questions California Firms Are Asking About SB 37
Does SB 37 apply to my firm's website, or only to paid advertising?
Your website. The amended definition of "advertisement" covers any electronic communication providing information about a lawyer's services for the purpose of encouraging someone to hire them, whether it is directed at the general public or a limited group. A practice-area page written to generate calls meets that description. Paid media is included, but it was never the outer boundary of the rule.
What exactly has to appear on the page?
Conspicuously: the lawyer's or law firm's name, and the city, town, or county of at least one bona fide office location — or the address of record listed with the State Bar. The simplest implementation is a global footer block that every template inherits, which also catches standalone landing pages.
What are the penalties?
Business and Professions Code section 6156.5, added by SB 37, lets any person bring a civil action for a violation of section 6155 seeking statutory damages of not less than $5,000 and not more than $100,000 per violation, or three times actual damages, whichever is larger, plus other remedies. State Bar discipline under the existing Rules of Professional Conduct remains available separately.
My agency wrote the copy. Am I still responsible?
Yes. That is one of the central changes. Attorneys are answerable for content produced by marketing vendors, referral services, and directories they participate in. Get a complete inventory of everything published in your firm's name and read it.
Can I still publish case results?
Case results are not banned. What is prohibited is misleading, deceptive, or false statements about a lawyer's skills, experience, or record, and guarantees of outcome. Specific, accurate, contextualized results with an appropriate disclaimer are a different thing from "we get maximum compensation". Confirm your approach with your own counsel.
What about the award badges on my homepage?
Look at what each one cost. Recognition from organizations that charge a membership or listing fee is specifically called out. If the seal was effectively purchased, the safest move is to remove it — and it was never persuading a sophisticated client anyway.
Do out-of-state firms advertising into California have to comply?
Advertising directed at California consumers is the relevant test, not where the server or the marketing team sits. Any firm running campaigns into the California market should be reviewing against SB 37. This is a question worth putting to counsel rather than to a marketing agency.
How does this interact with AI-generated ad copy?
The statute does not care who — or what — wrote the sentence. Auto-generated headlines and assets are your advertising, published under your bar number. If any part of your ad account or content pipeline generates copy, someone has to review the output on a recurring schedule rather than only at launch.
If you want a second set of eyes on what your firm's pages currently claim — and what AI search is repeating about you — get in touch. We audit California law firm websites for exactly this: what the page says, what it can substantiate, and what it is generating in search.
