A law firm isn’t buying traffic. It’s buying somebody who won’t create a problem.

The hard part is that everything you publish can be looked at later. By a regulator, by a complainant, or by the other side. And the person who wrote it will be long gone.

I’ve spent five years on the other side of that. I co-founded Claims Bible, which runs under an FCA authorisation, so every page on it counts as a financial promotion. I keep its compliance register. So I’ve had to learn this properly rather than learn to nod at it.

Here’s what I think that means in practice.

Consent that would survive being read back to you

Nearly every form I’m shown fails on the same things.

Separate boxes for separate things, none of them ticked in advance. The exact wording stored with the record, not a reference to a policy that has since changed. A timestamp. The page it was captured on. And where the person came from.

Five things. If a form can’t do all five, it doesn’t go live.

One more, which is the one that catches people out. Consent to share an enquiry with a firm is not consent to market to that person afterwards. They’re different permissions and they need separate homes, and inferring the second from the first is the most common mistake I see.

The list I switched off

A list of 17,114 people came in through a lead marketplace. The permission behind it was a single blanket opt-in.

15,233 of them were in the new database by the time I looked. I excluded all of them from marketing.

That wasn’t a close call and I didn’t argue about it. A permission that can’t be evidenced isn’t a permission, it’s an asset that turns into a liability the first time somebody asks. The list was the only thing I lost. It would have been the least valuable thing to lose.

Corrections at scale, which is where most firms are exposed

The Financial Ombudsman changed its default interest rate at the start of 2026. The site still said 8%, on 129 pages, including inside letter templates people were sending to their own banks.

A dry run first. Then 217 edits across 126 files and three templates, with eight pages rewritten by hand because a script would have mangled them.

Then the bit that mattered more. I changed the wording to “base rate plus 1%” so it can’t go stale the same way again.

Most firms can’t answer the question “where does this claim appear on our site” without somebody spending a day on it. That’s the real exposure. Not the wrong number, but not being able to find it.

You can be found for what you do without pretending to be something you’re not

Here’s a problem I had to solve on the other site, and it’s the reverse of yours.

Around 1,800 people a month search things like “hearing loss solicitors” and “industrial deafness solicitors”. Claims Bible isn’t a law firm. It’s a claims management company that introduces people to panel firms. So ranking for those searches risks giving the impression it’s something it isn’t, which is the exact thing the rules there prohibit.

The answer wasn’t to avoid the searches. It was three things.

1. Titles that read as a guide to choosing a solicitor, rather than as a firm of them
2. A description saying plainly what the business is, and naming the firm the button leads to
3. The banner at the top of the page, saying the same thing, left where it was

Nine existing titles used the word “solicitor”. Five were already fine, because they were informational. Four were rewritten. That decision rests on specific rules, and I’d rather cite them than wave at them: CMCOB 3.2.1R and 3.2.4R(1), CAP 2.3, and the ASA’s guidance on lead generators.

Your rule book is a different one. You are solicitors, so the word isn’t the problem for you, and your regulator’s advertising rules are the SRA’s rather than the ones above. I’m not going to tell you what those permit, because that isn’t my call to make.

What transfers is the discipline. Find the rule, write to it, and write down which rule you wrote to.

A register rather than a memory

Every compliance question that has come up on that site has a numbered entry. There are 45 of them.

Each one separates three things that get muddled everywhere else: what is known to be fact, what somebody remembers, and what has actually been ruled on, by whom, and on what date.

That sounds bureaucratic. It’s the opposite. It’s the thing that lets you move quickly, because a question that has already been answered doesn’t get relitigated every time a new person joins.

Where I stop

This is the part I’d want to know about a marketing supplier, so I’ll say it first.

I’m not a compliance consultant and I don’t sign anything off. Some questions don’t get answered by the person doing the marketing, and I think anyone in my position who tells you otherwise is selling you a risk.

Four of them always go to a solicitor.

1. Referral fees, and the restrictions on prescribed legal business
2. Anything touching an individual’s personal liability
3. Fee caps and the terms of a conditional fee agreement
4. Anything that might have to be reported to a regulator

“Probably fine” isn’t a position. Either I can point at the rule, or it goes to somebody who can.

The instinct you’re actually hiring

The site I run said our partner firms had recovered a figure I couldn’t trace.

So I went back to all three partner firms and asked each of them for their real number, in writing. Added up, they came to less than the figure we were publishing. I changed the site.

Nobody asked me to make our own headline number smaller - I did it because a figure you can’t evidence isn’t an asset, it’s a question waiting to be asked. The whole thing is written up here.

If you’re hiring somebody to write your financial promotions, that’s the instinct you’re hiring. The search work is the easy half.

Questions I get asked

Who this is for

Firms that have been through the cycle of hiring an agency that didn’t understand the rules, and then a compliance review that undid the work.

And firms where the marketing is currently slow because everything waits for a sign-off from somebody who has fifty other things to do. Half of that queue is usually questions that have already been answered and written down nowhere.

Tell me what you’re regulated by and what you’re trying to promote, and I’ll tell you what I’d want to check before we start.

The service this note is about is marketing in regulated sectors, and the write-up with the register in it is the Claims Bible compliance case study.