The recent growth of the Internet and social media (and their corresponding infiltration into our daily lives) has given advertisers the ability to define target audiences with unprecedented specificity—and these advances have not been lost on tech-savvy lawyers. In fact, targeted advertising has proven invaluable to attorneys looking to advertise specialty legal services, for example, in a particular area, in response to a single event or in an effort to generate support for an already filed case. What often goes unnoticed is that legal ethics rules may limit or even outright prohibit many forms of modern targeted legal advertising. But simply being aware of the issue might give an attorney the upper hand in a particular instance.

Targeted advertising means an attempt to reach a specific audience. Historically, direct mail encapsulated the concept, and legal ethics rules were largely developed around concerns associated with that medium. The Internet and social media in particular, however, have taken the concept of “targeting” an audience to a whole new level. Advertisers (to wit, lawyers) can now place their ads exclusively in front of highly targeted markets. For example, Facebook allows advertisers to narrow ads to only a specific group of Facebook users according to the users’ location, age, gender, relationships, education, finances and interests. Google’s Gmail can “read” and interpret users’ emails and place ads before an individual user that correspond with the user’s perceived interests. Companies can even track users online (and follow the same user between devices), and then use that data to direct specific ads.

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