What Are the Advertising Rules for Lawyers in Australia? (Every State, Including the Two Rulings That Changed Queensland)

In December 2025 the principal of a Gold Coast personal injury firm was fined $30,000 and found guilty of professional misconduct over a "No Win No Fee" billboard on a building full of doctors, some confident lines on the firm's website and a handful of Instagram and LinkedIn posts. Five months later, the director of a different Gold Coast firm was taken to the same tribunal over "no win no fee" and "free consultation" on the firm's website. The tribunal sided with the director on both phrases, and the outcome was a reprimand with no fine, for a few lines that sold the firm a little too hard.

Those two decisions say more about how lawyer advertising rules work in Australia than most of the guides written about them. The rules are a patchwork. One national conduct rule applies everywhere, three jurisdictions have their own personal injury advertising laws, New South Wales repealed its version a decade ago and most guides haven't noticed, and on top of all of it sit Meta and Google, whose policies will reject ads the law would happily allow.

We run Google and Meta ads for law firms in every state, so we deal with these rules every week. We're a marketing agency, not lawyers, and nothing here is legal advice. What follows is how the rules read, what the tribunals have said, and how we build campaigns around them. Get your own advice before you run anything you're unsure about.

What are the advertising rules for lawyers in Australia?

Every solicitor in Australia is bound by an advertising conduct rule, and in most states it's rule 36 of the Australian Solicitors' Conduct Rules. Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory then add personal injury advertising laws on top. The Australian Consumer Law applies to every firm, as it does to any business.

Three things apply everywhere: the conduct rule, the Australian Consumer Law (in particular s 18 on misleading conduct and s 29 on false representations), and the ban on contingency fees. The ad platforms' own policies apply everywhere too, and we'll come to those.

What does rule 36 say?

Rule 36.1 says a solicitor or principal must make sure any advertising, marketing or promotion "in connection with the solicitor or law practice" is not false, misleading or deceptive (or likely to mislead or deceive), offensive, or prohibited by law.

Rule 36.2 says you must not "convey a false, misleading or deceptive impression of specialist expertise", and must not use the words "accredited specialist" or a derivative of them unless you're accredited by the relevant professional association.

A few things in that wording matter for marketing:

• "In connection with" means the ads your agency writes are your responsibility. There's no defence in "the marketing company did it". Every ad we run goes to the firm for approval before it goes live, for exactly this reason.
• "Prohibited by law" pulls the state personal injury laws in. A breach of the Queensland or WA advertising law is also a breach of the conduct rule. That's how a single billboard can turn into a professional misconduct finding.
• There's no pre-approval step. Nobody checks your ads before they run. The first you hear about a problem is usually a letter from the regulator.

You'll see some guides say rule 36 prohibits advertising that's "likely to diminish public confidence" in the profession. It doesn't say that. That idea sits closer to the general rules on disreputable conduct.

Which states restrict personal injury advertising?

Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory. Each has a law that limits what a lawyer can say when advertising personal injury services, with a carve-out for some content on the firm's own website in Queensland and WA.

Queensland

The Personal Injuries Proceedings Act 2002 is the strictest of the three, and it binds everyone, not just lawyers.

A statement "advertises personal injury services" if it "may reasonably be thought to be intended or likely to encourage or induce" someone to make a personal injury claim, under any Act or law, or to use a particular lawyer. That catches WorkCover and CTP claims as well as negligence claims. It doesn't matter that the statement is also about something else, and "published" includes your website, social media, radio, TV and video.

Outside your own website, a personal injury ad can state only your name, contact details and any area of practice or speciality, and only through an "allowable publication method": printed publications, online copies of an independent printed publication, independent online directories, signs on buildings and vehicles, printed material delivered to premises, and receipts. The Act's own example of a breach is advertising "on a 'no win, no fee' or other speculative basis".

On your own website you can also explain how the law of negligence works, a person's rights under it, and "the conditions under which" your firm is prepared to act.

Western Australia

The Civil Liability Act 2002 (WA) has an almost identical scheme that most guides miss. Some list WA as having no personal injury provision. It does, and it survived WA joining the Uniform Law in 2022.

Section 17 prohibits lawyers, and anyone acting for them, from publishing a statement likely to encourage a personal injury claim, except as section 18 allows: your name and contact details, "with or without information as to any area of practice, speciality, or accreditation", by print, independent online directories, signage, leaflets and receipts. The own website exception mirrors Queensland's. The maximum penalty is $10,000, and a breach can also be unprofessional conduct.

WA adds a rule about health workers. Someone working at a hospital or the scene of an accident can give out a firm's details only while giving similar details for at least three competing firms.

Northern Territory

The Legal Profession Act 2006 (NT) allows a "complying statement" with your name, contact details and area of speciality, published by an allowed method. Two differences from Queensland and WA matter. The NT test is about your intention to have someone make a claim and engage you, and there is no express exception for your own website. If you practise personal injury law in the Territory, get advice before your website goes beyond name, contact details and speciality. The maximum penalty is 50 penalty units.

Are personal injury ads still restricted in NSW?

No. This is the most common mistake in Australian legal marketing guides, and it's ten years out of date.

The Law Society of NSW puts it plainly: the Uniform Law "does not include the prohibition on advertising personal injury legal services" that existed under the repealed Legal Profession Regulation 2005, and the Workers Compensation Regulation 2016 dropped the old ban on advertising work injury legal services. Since 2015, a NSW personal injury ad is governed by rule 36 and the Australian Consumer Law, like any other legal ad.

What NSW did add is the Claim Farming Practices Prohibition Act 2025:

Section 7 is the line that matters for marketing. Paying Google, Meta or an agency to advertise your firm to the public is fine. Paying someone per referred claimant, or buying a list of people who've been injured, is where the offence sits. A separate bill to extend claim farming rules to CTP claims was still before the NSW Parliament at the time of writing. Our article on whether lawyers can buy leads covers the lead-buying side in more detail.

What did the Bray and Mills decisions decide?

Two Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal decisions, six months apart, mark out the line in Queensland better than any guideline. Both involved Gold Coast personal injury firms.

Bray is the warning. The billboard had been up for years, and the tribunal described the conduct as "of a general variety that is quite prevalent" in Queensland personal injury practice. It said the fine had to be large enough not to be "a mere 'cost of business'". Everyone else doing it was no defence.

Mills is the guide. The Commissioner argued "no win no fee" was a marketing slogan, not a condition, and lost. The tribunal said the website is judged as a whole rather than page by page, and that once someone has arrived at a firm's website a narrow reading of "conditions" doesn't serve the purpose of the Act. Explaining that the matter will be run by a named accredited specialist, with a photo and a bio, was also allowed as a condition. What crossed the line were the lines that did nothing but promote the firm.

It also accepted a point every compliant Queensland firm will recognise. The practitioner argued that uneven policing puts firms that follow the rules at a commercial disadvantage. The tribunal's answer was "That proposition must be true."

The other thing Mills shows is how enforcement actually works. The Commissioner wrote to the firm in 2020, 2023 and 2024 before filing in 2025. It's slow, but it doesn't go away. A Queensland firm we know of received a breach notice in 2024 and had to rewrite its website overnight and pause its social ads, and that disruption cost far more than any fine.

What can a Queensland personal injury firm put on its website?

After Mills, more than most firms think. Here's how we read it, phrase by phrase.

Two cautions. Mills was decided on one firm's website as a whole, and the Commission has said it is reviewing its personal injury materials, so this area could still move. And "no win no fee" must be complete wherever it appears. The Queensland Law Society's view is that the bare phrase is likely to mislead unless the client really pays nothing if they lose, including disbursements and the other side's costs, and that "conditions apply" on its own probably isn't enough.

Our article on whether personal injury lawyers can advertise in Queensland covers the channel side in more depth: the TPD route, Google Business Profile and how Performance Max can pull non-compliant images into your ads.

Can Queensland firms run Google and Meta ads for personal injury?

This is the most practically important question and the least settled one. The list of allowable publication methods in the Queensland Act doesn't mention paid search or social ads. Some practitioners and agencies read that as ruling them out. Older guidance from the Legal Services Commission treated search ads more like a directory listing, with the ad limited to name, contact details and area of practice and the landing page held to the website rules, but that guidance is no longer online while the Commission reviews it.

In practice, here's what we see. Byron's experience is that every Queensland personal injury principal has "a different tolerance" of what can and can't be done, and it usually tracks whether they've been through the Commission's scrutiny before. Firms that have tend to be conservative. Queensland firms also lean much harder on referrals and word of mouth than firms in Victoria or NSW, because the paid channels are narrower.

What we do for Queensland injury firms:

• Keep ad copy to name, contact details and area of practice in Google Ads and Meta for anything that could be read as advertising personal injury services. "Workers compensation lawyers, Brisbane" rather than "Injured at work? No win no fee".
• Send clicks to a landing page that follows the website exception. Law, rights and conditions, nothing that sells. Our guide to law firm landing pages covers the structure, with the sales elements stripped out for Queensland.
• Use text and qualification forms more than video. Video is "challenging in the Queensland market", in Byron's words. Some principals are happy to test it and others won't touch it. Elsewhere, video generally beats image ads for injury firms, as our video marketing guide explains.
• Get written sign-off from the firm on every ad and page. It's the firm's licence on the line, so it's the firm's call.

Our ads for Queensland firms play by the rulebook and still perform. The firms that struggle are usually the ones that ran a national campaign written for NSW and Victoria and then discovered Queensland the hard way.

Where can you not advertise in Queensland, WA and the NT?

In or on a hospital, and the definition is wider than the word suggests. Under the Queensland Act, "hospital" includes premises used to treat sick or injured people and premises providing a service "for maintaining, improving or restoring a person's health and wellbeing". The Act's own examples include a medical centre, a physiotherapist's rooms, a dentist's surgery and a nursing home. The Bray billboard was on a building "occupied primarily by medical practitioners". You also can't deliver printed material to, or leave it on vehicles near, those premises. WA and the NT have the same restriction.

Touting is banned too. In Queensland and WA, a person at the scene of an accident or at a hospital can't solicit a claim, and people who learn about incidents through their work (tow truck drivers, ambulance officers, hospital staff) can't pass on a particular firm's name. Queensland's claim farming provisions also ban paying for claim referrals and paid cold contact, with the same 300 penalty unit maximum, and require law practice certificates on every claim.

Can you call yourself a specialist or an expert?

Only carefully. Rule 36.2 stops you using "accredited specialist", or a derivative of it, unless you're accredited, and stops you conveying a false impression of specialist expertise. The Queensland Law Society's guidance is that a claim "to be a specialist or to specialise is likely to be seen to be a claim to expertise rather than just to a preferred or usual area of practice", and that the Commission considers "specialist" itself is probably a derivative of "accredited specialist". Accreditation is personal, so if one of your lawyers is accredited, say that they are, not that the firm is.

Can lawyers use testimonials, reviews and case results in ads?

Outside the Queensland, WA and NT personal injury rules, yes, if they're genuine and used with care. The Australian Consumer Law prohibits false or misleading testimonials, and if a testimonial is challenged it's presumed misleading unless you can produce evidence it's genuine. Get written consent, keep the original, and don't edit it in a way that changes its meaning.

Past results need context. Under rule 36, "We recovered $1.2 million for a client" can imply the next client will get something similar. Say what kind of matter it was and that every matter is different.

In Queensland and WA, testimonials and settlement amounts in personal injury advertising are neither name, contact details nor the law and conditions, so they very likely fall outside what's allowed, including on your website. Mills supports that reading: even a line saying many clients are referred by other lawyers was a breach.

Emails to people who aren't yet clients count as advertising too, which matters for injury firms in Queensland. Our article on email marketing for law firms covers the carve-out for existing clients.

Online reviews have their own rules. You can't offer anything in exchange for a review, you can't ask only happy clients, and when you reply you mustn't confirm the reviewer was a client. Our guide to getting Google reviews for a law firm covers what Google allows and how to reply without breaching confidentiality.

What are the rules on "no win no fee" and fees advertising?

The leading case on the bare phrase is from WA. In Legal Practitioners Complaints Committee and Browne [2006] WASAT 201, "no compensation = no legal fees" was held to be misleading because clients could still be liable for costs. That logic applies in every state.

What do Meta and Google allow law firms to advertise?

Even when the law allows an ad, the platform may not. These rules catch more of our clients' ads than state law does.

Meta's personal attributes policy. Ads "must not contain content that asserts or implies personal attributes", including physical or mental health and financial status. Meta's own examples of breaches are "Do you have diabetes?" and "Depression getting you down?". So hooks like "Injured at work?" or "Were you charged with drink driving?" are at real risk of rejection, in any state. You can still say "you" in an ad, as long as it doesn't assert something about the person reading it. Lead form questions have limits too: Meta won't allow a form field asking whether someone has been charged with a crime, which matters for criminal lawyers, and our intake form guide covers what to ask instead. Our guides to Facebook ads for law firms and Meta vs Google ads cover the rest of the setup.

Financial services verification. Australia is one of the regions where Meta requires advertiser verification for ads promoting financial products and services, including insurance, and Google requires financial services verification for Australian advertisers in that category. Total and permanent disability claims through superannuation sit close enough to insurance that our TPD ads for one firm were rejected until verification was sorted. Our article on personal injury marketing by claim type covers why so many firms run TPD campaigns. If you run TPD or income protection ads, expect to verify.

Account health. Disapproved ads aren't harmless. Each one counts against the ad account, and Byron's view from experience is that a build-up of them contributed to an earlier PixelRush ad account being restricted. We now clear out disapproved ads before launching new ones, and we'd suggest you do the same.

Google Ads. Google doesn't have a special legal category, but its restrictions on personalised advertising limit remarketing around health-related content, and Performance Max can generate images and videos from your website and Business Profile that you didn't write. In Queensland that's a compliance risk. Turn off automatically created assets and check what's running. Our guide to Google Ads for law firms covers the setup.

What does the same ad look like in three states?

Here's one workers compensation ad, written for each state's rules and Meta's.

If you advertise in more than one state, from Perth to Adelaide to Brisbane, this is the practical consequence: separate campaigns, geographically targeted, with copy written for each. A single national personal injury campaign is how firms end up breaching the Queensland Act with an ad that was perfectly legal in Melbourne.

What do law firms most often get wrong?

None of this means you can't advertise well. Some of the best performing injury campaigns we run are in the most restricted state. The firms that do well treat compliance as part of the brief rather than something to check at the end. Your website is covered by the same rules, and our guide to what a law firm website should include shows how they shape the design. It's also part of what makes our personal injury marketing work in Brisbane different from the same campaign in Melbourne or Sydney.

If you'd like a second set of eyes on how your firm advertises across states, book a call and we'll walk through your current ads. And for the legal answer on anything specific, ask your law society's ethics line. It's free, and they'd rather hear from you before the ad runs than after.