Before we get into this, I want to clear something up.
When I refer to advertising, I’m talking about placing ads on the TikTok platform via payment to TikTok.
When I searched the phrase in the title, it was filled with folks who were confused between simply having an account and posting and placing paid advertisements.
If you’re a lawyer and want to know if you can have an account and post content, then yes, you can.
However, this is not “advertising.” It’s content creation.
Now that we’ve covered that, let’s move on to the question at hand.
According to their fine print, TikTok does allow ads for Legal Services.
That comes with a huge “but.”
You can run Legal Services ads as long as they’re not in the following practice areas:
+ Criminal Law
+ Immigration Law
+ Employment Law
+ Real Estate Law
+ Class Actions
+ Family Law
+ Cases involving children (e.g. child abuse, child custody)
+ Personal Injury Lawsuits
It doesn’t mean you cannot run ads if you or your firm operates in one of those areas.
You can possibly run ads, but they’ll have to be some of the most vanilla ads you’ve ever seen.
You can’t refer to what you do. You can’t link to your website with content on those practice areas.
If you’re a lawyer with a massive brand in an area and people already know what you do, you could do some strict branding-only ads. You know, given that your brand name doesn’t include the words “injury,” “immigration,” or “divorce,” and so on.
However, there aren’t many lawyers with a strong enough brand where it would make sense to run ads like that.
There are some, but not many.
In the future, TikTok may change its policies, but currently (this was written May 10th, 2023), very few lawyers are allowed to run ads on their platform.
If they change the policy, and begin allowing some of these legal practice areas, we will update this article.