The Supreme Court settled whether you may write. Your state bar decides how.

Every state licenses its own lawyers, so every state writes its own rules of professional conduct. Nearly all of them start from the American Bar Association's Model Rules, and the rule that governs a letter to a defendant is Model Rule 7.3, Solicitation of Clients. The Model Rule defines a solicitation as a communication initiated by or on behalf of a lawyer, directed to a specific person the lawyer knows or reasonably should know needs legal services in a particular matter, that offers to provide those services. A letter to someone arrested yesterday is the textbook case.

The Model Rule draws its hard line at live person-to-person contact — in-person, face-to-face, or live telephone solicitation for the lawyer's financial gain — and prohibits that, with narrow exceptions for other lawyers, family, close personal or prior professional relationships, and businesses that routinely use the kind of legal service offered. Written communication that the recipient can set down and think about is treated differently: it is permitted, subject to two further limits that apply everywhere — no solicitation of a person who has made known a desire not to be solicited, and none that involves coercion, duress, or harassment. Rule 7.1 adds the standing requirement that nothing a lawyer communicates about legal services may be false or misleading.

The variation is in what states bolt on. For decades the Model Rule itself required the words “Advertising Material” on the envelope and the letter; the ABA removed that clause from the model text in 2018, but many states kept it in their own rule, and some added more — a disclosure of how the lawyer obtained the recipient's name, a copy filed with the bar or a review committee, a retention period for every letter sent, or a waiting period after certain events. The phrase 'attorney solicitation rules by state' describes exactly that layer: a shared federal floor, a shared model rule, and fifty different sets of additions on top.

For how the letters themselves are built and mailed, start with the legal direct mail guide; this page covers only the rules the letters travel under.

Source: the ABA's Model Rule 7.3 page.

Mailing someone after an arrest is legal as a matter of constitutional law — and the reason is a 1988 Supreme Court case about foreclosure letters, not arrest letters. In Shapero v. Kentucky Bar Ass'n, a Kentucky lawyer asked his bar to approve a truthful letter to homeowners who had foreclosure suits filed against them. The bar found nothing false or misleading in it and still refused, because Kentucky's rule banned any mailing prompted by a specific event involving the addressee. The Supreme Court held that a state may not categorically prohibit lawyers from sending truthful, non-deceptive letters to people known to face a particular legal problem. Targeted mail is commercial speech, and the recipient of a letter — unlike the target of a phone call or a hospital-room visit — can put it in a drawer, show it to a friend, or throw it away.

Shapero is why arrest mail exists as a legal category at all. An arrest is a public record; a person with a pending charge needs a lawyer in a particular matter; a letter offering representation is precisely the communication the Court protected. The decision also pointed to the tools states could use instead of a ban — reviewing letters after the fact, requiring copies to be filed, requiring the mailing to be identified as advertising — which is where most of the state-level rules on this page come from.

Legal is not the same as unregulated. What Shapero forbids is the blanket ban. What it leaves in place is the state's power to say how the letter must be labeled, what it must disclose, whether a copy must be filed, and — after the next case — whether it must wait.

The record side of that sentence — where arrest records come from and how fast they post — is covered on arrest records for attorneys.

Source: Justia's full text of Shapero v. Kentucky Bar Ass'n, 486 U.S. 466 (1988).

The '30-day rule' is shorthand for a waiting period, and it comes from Florida Bar v. Went For It, Inc. (1995). The Florida Bar had adopted a rule barring personal-injury and wrongful-death lawyers from sending targeted mail to accident victims and their families for thirty days after the accident, and it backed the rule with a two-year study of how such letters landed on grieving recipients and on the profession's reputation. A five-to-four Court upheld it. The state had a substantial interest in protecting the privacy of the injured and the standing of the bar, the thirty-day pause served that interest directly, and the letter could still be sent on day thirty-one.

Two things about that holding matter for a criminal defense or family law practice. First, the Court upheld a rule aimed at accident victims in the personal-injury context; it did not announce a national thirty-day rule for every kind of solicitation. Second, it confirmed that states may impose waiting periods when they can justify them — so some states have extended the idea to other matter types, some apply it only to injury and death cases, and many apply no waiting period at all to a letter about an arrest or a court filing. The correct question is never 'is there a 30-day rule?' but 'is there a waiting period in this state, for this matter type, triggered by this event?'

That is the practical shape of the rule for a mail program: a calendar, keyed to state, matter type, and triggering event. In a market with no applicable waiting period, a same-day letter is the whole point of the program. Where a waiting period applies, the record is held and the letter mails on the first permitted day. Leads For Lawyers builds that calendar into production for every market it serves, which is why the compliance line on every practice-area page reads the same way: state waiting periods are honored where they apply.

Source: Justia's full text of Florida Bar v. Went For It, Inc., 515 U.S. 618 (1995).

Start with what it may not say. Under Rule 7.1, which every state adopts in some form, a lawyer's communication about legal services cannot be false or misleading — which reaches promises about outcomes, unverifiable comparisons with other lawyers, and any statement that would create an unjustified expectation. A letter that names the recipient's actual charge and describes what the firm does is inside the line; a letter that implies the firm has already reviewed the case, or that a fine is certain unless the recipient calls, is not.

Then the affirmative requirements, which are where lawyer solicitation letter rules vary most. Many states require the letter, and the envelope, to be marked as advertising — the classic 'Advertising Material' label, sometimes with a prescribed phrase, placement, or type size. Some require the letter to tell the recipient how the lawyer learned of the matter — that the name came from a public arrest or court record. Some require a statement that the recipient should disregard the letter if they already have a lawyer. Some require the lawyer's name and office address, and a few prescribe what the first line of the letter must be. Separately from the bar rules, a person who tells a lawyer they do not want to be solicited may not be solicited again; a working mail program needs a suppression list for that.

Finally, the rules that concern the file rather than the page. Some states require a copy of each solicitation letter, or a copy of each form letter, to be filed with the bar or a review committee — before use in a few states, on request in others. Many require the lawyer to retain a copy of every solicitation and a record of who received it, for a fixed number of years. The table below groups the recurring elements. It is deliberately written in 'many states' and 'some states' language; the state-specific version belongs to the counsel-reviewed pages described at the end of this guide.

It can, and the rules are written on the assumption that it will. Model Rule 7.3 defines a solicitation as a communication initiated 'by or on behalf of' a lawyer or law firm, which means a letter mailed by a vendor under a firm's name is the firm's solicitation in every respect that matters. Model Rule 5.3 makes a lawyer responsible for the conduct of the nonlawyers the firm employs or retains, and Rule 8.4 says a lawyer may not do through another what the lawyer may not do directly. Outsourcing the production of a letter does not outsource responsibility for it.

That is the right way to evaluate any mail vendor, and it is how Leads For Lawyers is built. The letters go out under the subscribing firm's name, with the firm's approved copy and brochure, and the responses come back to the firm's tracked number. Leads For Lawyers never mails in its own name, never offers legal services, and never contacts a recipient by phone or in person — the live-contact solicitation the rules prohibit is not part of the program. What the vendor contributes is production discipline: the record harvested the day it posts, the piece composed for the specific charge, the labeling and disclosures the state requires, the calendar held where a waiting period applies.

The division of labor is simple to state. The firm decides what the letter says and approves it; the firm answers to its bar for it; the firm keeps the records its state requires. Leads For Lawyers makes sure that what the firm approved is what goes into the mailbox, on the day the rules allow, in every market the firm subscribes to. Any vendor that cannot describe its side of that division in a sentence is asking the firm to carry a risk it cannot see.

The step-by-step version — harvest, match, compose, mail, measure — is on how it works.

Leads For Lawyers has mailed on behalf of attorneys in all 50 states since 1992, which means the rules on this page are not an abstraction to us; they are production settings. Every mailing complies with applicable state bar rules on written solicitation, including required advertising labeling and state waiting periods where they apply. The label a state requires is part of the piece template; the disclosure of source is composed into the letter where the state calls for it; the waiting period, where one applies, is a hold on the record before it enters the print queue.

Production runs from three strategically placed mail houses in Los Angeles, Milwaukee, and Atlanta, and the compliance settings travel with the record, not the plant: a piece for a subscribing firm is composed to that firm's state rules regardless of which mail house prints it. First-Class mail the same day the record posts — the speed the program is known for — is the default only where the rules permit it. Where they do not, the calendar governs, and the firm's campaign report shows the mailing dates either way.

Two things the program does not do. It does not decide the rules for the firm — the firm's approval of its letter and brochure copy, and its own bar's guidance, come first, and any state-specific requirement the firm flags is built into that firm's template. And it does not interpret a state's rule in public: the Model Rule and the two Supreme Court cases above are the only rules this page states, and the state-by-state detail is being prepared with counsel rather than paraphrased from memory.

Every program is scoped to your counties and case types — so the practical next step is to tell us where you practice and what you handle.

A state-by-state guide to attorney solicitation rules — each state's labeling requirement, disclosure language, filing and retention rules, and any waiting period by matter type, with citations to that state's rule of professional conduct — is in preparation and is being reviewed by counsel before publication. Each state will have its own page under this guide.

Until those pages are live, this page stays deliberately general, and the authoritative source for any state is that state's rules of professional conduct and its bar's ethics guidance. If you subscribe to a market in the meantime, the mail that goes out under your firm's name goes out inside that state's rules; ask us which requirements your state's template carries and we will show you the piece.

For the practice-area view of the same program, see criminal defense — the area where solicitation-rule questions arrive most often.