CHAPTER 5 - 5-7 CONTACT WITH PROSPECTIVE CLIENTS

• Jurisdiction: United States

5-7 Contact with Prospective Clients

5-7:1 Direct Contact

Lawyers may not solicit professional employment by live person-to-person contact when a significant motive for the lawyer's doing so is the lawyer's or law firms pecuniary gain⁹² unless the contact is with a lawyer or person who has a family, close person, or prior business or professional relationship with the lawyer,⁹³ under the auspices of a public or charitable legal services organization⁹⁴ , under the auspices of a bona fide political, social, civic, fraternal, employee, trade organization whose purposes include but are not limited to providing or recommending legal services, if the legal services are related to the principal purposes of the organization⁹⁵ or with a person who routinely uses for business purposes the type of legal services offered by the lawyer or with a business organization, a not-for-profit organization or governmental body and the lawyer seeks to provide services related to the organization.⁹⁶

A lawyer may not solicit professional employment, even when not otherwise prohibited by Rule 7.3(b), if the lawyer knows or reasonably should know that the physical, emotional or mental state of the person makes it unlikely that the person would not be able to exercise reasonable judgment in employing the lawyer,⁹⁷ the target of the solicitation has made known to the lawyer a desire not to be solicited by the lawyer,⁹⁸ the solicitation involves duress, fraud, overreaching, harassment, intimidation or undue influence⁹⁹ or the solicitation concerns an action for personal injury or wrongful death or otherwise relates to an accident or disaster involving the person to whom the solicitation is addressed or a relative of that person, unless the accident or disaster occurred more than forty days prior to the mailing of the communication.¹⁰⁰

Rule 7.3, the so-called "no-solicitation" rule, was significantly amended in 2019, along with Rules 7.1 and 7.2. Rule 7.4, dealing with certification as a specialist, was repealed and a portion of it was added to the Rule 7.2. Rule 7.5, dealing with firm names and letterhead, was also repealed, and a portion of it added to Rule 7.2. "Solicitation" or "solicit" is defined by Rule 7.3(a) as "a communication initiated by or on behalf of a lawyer or law firm that is directed to a specific person the lawyer knows or reasonably should know needs legal services in a particular matter and that offers to provide, or reasonably can be understood as offering to...