MADigitalProSB 37 Exposure Audit System
Damages are assessed per advertisement. How many are you running?
Count the Meta creatives. Then the landing pages, the lead forms, the SMS templates, the drip emails, the pre-roll. Under SB 37 every one of them is an advertisement, and every one carries $5,000 to $100,000 in statutory damages if it fails.
For California firms running paid acquisition. Not on sale yet.
What this normally costs
The alternative is priced by the hour.
One firm licence. Files, not a course.
The scope problem
Most firms think “our advertising” means the billboard.
SB 37 does not. It defines an advertisement as any written, recorded or electronic communication to the public, or to a targeted group, that encourages someone to retain a lawyer.
Which means every Meta creative variant. Every landing page. Every lead form. Every SMS template. Every email in the nurture sequence. Every YouTube pre-roll. Every IVR script. Every SEO page written to attract injury clients.
A mid-sized firm running paid acquisition typically has between forty and three hundred assets that meet that definition. Almost none have been read against the statute since they were written. And a single defective consent block, one that says “you agree to be contacted by us and our marketing partners” instead of naming the firm, is replicated across every one of them.
What actually decides the outcome
A firm cannot withdraw an advertisement it cannot find.
SB 37 does not let a consumer walk straight into court. A complaint is filed with the State Bar and served on the advertiser first. If the challenged advertisement comes down inside the statutory window, the exposure changes shape entirely.
That window is short, it starts without warning, and it only helps a firm that already knows which assets are live, where they sit, and who can take them down.
The firms that get hurt by SB 37 will not be the ones with a bad headline. They will be the ones who cannot produce an inventory.
The mechanism
Four rule sets. One severity scale. One action per tier.
California Rules of Professional Conduct 7.1 to 7.4. Business and Professions Code sections 6157 to 6158.4 as amended by SB 37. The TCPA and 47 C.F.R. 64.1200, including the seller-identification element of prior express written consent. Platform advertising standards. All four apply at once and the strictest one governs.
The system collapses them into a single detection protocol: ten violation classes, each with the phrases and patterns that trigger it, each mapped to the rule it comes from, each classified Critical, High, Medium or Low, with one prescribed action per tier. Critical means pause today. Low means fix in the next creative cycle.
You are never asked to make a legal judgement. You are asked to run a checklist.
Every check cites the rule it comes from, so you can verify any of it yourself
What you get
Six working files. No video, no modules, no login.
The Exposure Ledger
One row per advertising asset: channel, what was found, severity, fixed yes or no, date. Work through it and the finished sheet is your dated advertising file.
Google Sheet
The Detection Protocol
Ten violation classes with the exact trigger phrases for each, the rule each one comes from, and a worked example. The engine the rest of it runs on.
PDF reference
The Four Checklists
State bar rules, SB 37, TCPA and platform policy as tick-boxes that total a severity count as you go. Roughly 120 discrete checkpoints.
Second tab of the ledger
The Rewrite Library
Every prohibited phrase paired with an approved replacement, across headlines, body copy, CTAs, fee language and SMS. Nothing invented under pressure.
The Vendor Supervision Pack
The email that sends the standard to your agency, the pre-flight approval form they sign, and the withdrawal-contact list. Removes the hardest conversation from your desk.
Editable doc
The Withdrawal Procedure
What happens in the hours after a complaint is served. Decision tree, checklist by media type, and what to preserve. The one file you hope never to open.
Plus three additions for the parts nobody checks
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The Pixel & Audience Purge. A prohibited-term list for platform event names, conversion parameters and CRM field labels, with neutral replacements. An event called SpinalInjuryLead is a data violation nobody outside your firm can see.
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The Creative Substitution Guide. Three-tier imagery classification and disclosure placement specs by ad format, so fixing the copy does not break the creative.
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The California Benchmark Sheet. CPM, CTR, cost per lead, contact rate and cost per signed case bands for California PI, so you can tell a compliance problem from a performance one.
The first fifteen minutes
It opens on a nine-question test of your lead form.
Not a welcome video. Not a contents page. The first thing in the system is a short test of the consent language on your own lead form, because in practice most firms fail at least one item on it.
The common failures, generic “marketing partners” wording, no autodialer disclosure, no “consent is not required” statement, each classify as Critical. And each affects every lead already captured through that form, not just the ads pointing at it.
If nothing trips, you have spent fifteen minutes and can ask for a refund. Most people do not get that far.
Getting it
It is not on sale yet.
The Consent & Disclosure Vault
The audit will tell you the consent block fails. This is the wording that passes: prior express written consent blocks in each configuration, identification blocks by placement, results disclaimers, fee language in both cost-responsibility variants, and TCPA-compliant SMS templates. Copy, paste, done. It ships alongside the audit system.
Being straight with you: it is not finished yet. The frameworks behind it are written and in use. Turning them into the six files above is a few days of work, and it is happening now. Rather than take your money for something you cannot open, here is the list.
You are on the list
One email when it is ready, nothing else. In the meantime, if you want a read on what is publicly visible in your live advertising, the ad teardown is free and exists today.
Be clear on the boundaries
What this is not.
- No
Not legal advice. It is a marketing compliance operations system. It surfaces items and cites the rule each one comes from. Whether any of it applies to your situation is a question for your own bar counsel.
- No
Not a guarantee of anything. It does not make you compliant, it does not stop a complaint being filed, and it does not eliminate liability. It helps you find and document problems faster than you would otherwise.
- No
Not a performance audit. It says nothing about your cost per lead or what your ads produced. That needs account access, and that is the paid Diagnostic.
- No
Not done for you. You run it. If you would rather someone else did, start with the free ad teardown.
Questions
The ones worth asking.
Who are you to tell a lawyer about advertising rules?
We are performance marketers who run paid acquisition for personal injury firms, and we built this to keep our own campaigns inside the rules. It is not a legal opinion and does not pretend to be. Every check cites the rule it comes from, a CRPC rule number, a Business and Professions Code section, a C.F.R. section, so you can verify any of it yourself. Or hand the finished ledger to your own counsel and pay for an hour of interpretation instead of eight hours of inventory.
My agency handles compliance. Why would I need this?
The rules make the firm responsible for its advertising regardless of who produced it. Ask your agency which four rule sets they audit against and to produce the file. The Vendor Supervision Pack included here is the email that asks, along with the approval form they sign.
How long does it take?
Fifteen minutes to the first finding. Roughly ninety minutes for a full first pass across a typical account. It ships in two versions, a summary for the attorney and a worksheet for whoever runs the marketing, so you can forward one email and stay out of the spreadsheet.
Is it current?
Every rule carries the date it was last verified, and the system flags its own staleness rather than going quietly out of date. That matters more than it sounds. Two widely cited rules in this area moved between 2025 and 2026, and a great deal of vendor compliance material still in circulation cites at least one of them incorrectly.
What if I find violations? Does knowing make it worse?
A fair question, and we will not pretend to resolve it. Raise it with your counsel before you start. What we would say is that the statutory structure rewards a firm that can locate and withdraw an asset quickly, and penalises one that cannot find it at all.
We are not in California.
Then this is not for you yet. The state bar layer here is California-specific. The TCPA and platform layers apply anywhere, but you would be paying for roughly half a system.
Can I use this across my agency’s clients?
Not on this licence, which covers one firm. Email us about multi-client use and we will sort something out.
Marketing and policy operations tool, not legal advice. Purchasing does not create an attorney-client relationship. Citations are verified as of the date shown in the files and should be confirmed against current law before you rely on them.