Iris is built with bar ethics in mind.
State bars regulate how firms interact with prospective clients — advertising, solicitation, supervision. Intake sits inside all of it. This page explains how the design stays on the right side, and where the judgment calls belong to your counsel.
Last updated · June 30, 2026
The issue.
The rules that touch intake aren't one rule — they're several, overlapping. A rule about advertising, because intake conversations describe the firm's services. A rule about solicitation, because they involve prospective clients. A rule about supervision, because a non-attorney — and today, a tool — is doing the talking. And a rule about prospective clients themselves, covering what they share before an engagement exists.
Any product that talks to your prospective clients lives inside that overlap. It can be built to make compliance straightforward, or built so the firm has to work around it. Iris is the first kind — by design, not by afterthought.
What Iris is built to do.
Three design commitments that map directly onto the rules above. The privilege page covers the first two in full.
Inbound, not solicitation.
Solicitation rules regulate a firm initiating contact with prospective clients — and they're at their strictest where the prospective client is vulnerable. New York is the well-known example: its rules include time limits on targeted outreach to accident victims. States regulate this differently, but the direction is consistent — initiating contact is the regulated act.
Iris never initiates. It responds to people who arrived at the firm's website on their own, in a conversation the visitor started. Even the follow-ups go only to people who already spoke with Iris once, about a conversation already underway.
Inbound response is the other side of the solicitation line. It's one reason Iris is designed as a conversation your visitor opens — and why no version of it runs outbound campaigns.
Rules vary. Here's the map.
Three reference points, not a survey. Every state adapts the model differently — which is why the last section of this page is yours.
Your steps.
The first is a setting. The other two are the firm's — and they're where compliance actually lives.
A note on scope
This page describes how Iris is designed to operate within ethics rules. It is information — not legal advice, and not an opinion on your firm's compliance. For that, the authorities are your ethics counsel and your state bar's guidance, in that order.
Ethics questions, answered plainly.
We can't advise — but we can show you exactly what a caller sees, what the record contains, and how the system behaves, so your counsel is reviewing facts instead of marketing. Bring the questions your bar would ask.