Legal

Do you have a question about advertising or employment law? If you work for one of our member agencies, our in-house lawyers are ready to answer your questions, usually within 24 hours.

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Advertising in the UK is heavily regulated and it's important you know the rules. If you work for one of our member-agencies, we can help you understand the legal and regulatory requirements around advertising and help answer your advertising questions. We can also advise you on what the law demands of employers.

We're here to help you

    We have a small team of in-house lawyers who, every day, answer IPA member enquiries. We also write or comment on topical issues and let our members know what's happening in the advertising legal landscape. At any time, we could be advising on something as simple as the use of photographs in an ad or as complex as the GDPR. Alongside this, we're closely involved in supporting the industry's self-regulatory system to protect the public from misleading ads.

    Email us with your enquiry

    Every week, we deal with a high volume of enquiries, so we run a first-come, first-served system.

    For advertising law - please email legal@ipa.co.uk

    For employment law - please email employment@ipa.co.uk

    We aim to answer basic enquiries within 24 hours. More complex enquiries, including contract work will take longer, but we'll let you have a time estimate and keep you posted.

    Download the material you need

    You can access a wealth of material in our Knowledge Centre including: 

    Advertising Law

    Employment Law

    Privacy & Data Protection

    HFSS

    AI

    Public Affairs

    Our advertising law advice

    • application of the CAP and BCAP Codes
    • intellectual property rights
    • contracts
    • privacy and data protection
    • confidentiality
    • production issues
    • media buying/planning issues
    • pitches
    • liaising with the ASA, CAP, BCAP and Clearcast
    • pre-litigious disputes

    Our employment law advice

    • disciplinary, grievance and absence management issues
    • maternity, paternity, parental, shared parental and other family-friendly rights
    • flexible working
    • equalities law
    • TUPE
    • contractual issues and staff policies
    • redundancy, restructures and other dismissals

    We also offer a qualification through Lewis Silkin in the legal and regulatory ad basics called LegRegs.

    Important information

    • We only provide legal advice under the laws of England and Wales.
    • We are a small team and not resourced to provide an ‘end-to-end’ solution for all of the above services. Please contact us if you need further information.
    • Our advice is provided for the benefit of our member agencies only, and not for the benefit of any third parties, including non-member agencies within the same group as a member-agency, or clients. Such third parties have no right to access our services and the IPA accepts no liability for any advice provided by us on which they may rely. 
    • Our employment law advice is provided for the benefit of the member agency as an employer: we cannot provide advice to individual agency staff for their own benefit.
    • The IPA legal team also fulfils a public affairs role by representing members' interests to regulators and Government and works alongside the Advertising Association. 

    Each of the IPA’s Legal team is a UK-qualified solicitor, authorised and regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA). Although we provide our services to corporate members of the IPA, the IPA is not itself authorised or regulated by the SRA. Therefore, we are not required to, and do not, have compulsory minimum levels of indemnity insurance via the SRA to protect clients in case something goes wrong. Our services are, however, covered under the IPA’s professional indemnity insurance policy.

    Should you have a complaint about a member of the IPA’s Legal team, please email the IPA’s Legal & Public Affairs Director, Richard Lindsay, via richard@ipa.co.uk, or the IPA’s Director of Member Services, Tom Mott, via tom@ipa.co.uk.

    Contact

    Richard Lindsay

    Director of Legal & Public Affairs

    Telephone

    020 7201 8242

    Juliet Bawtree

    Associate Director, Legal & Public Affairs (Employment)

    Telephone

    0207 201 8202

    Helen Bowyer

    Associate Director, Advertising Law

    Telephone

    020 7201 8206

    Albert Yung

    Senior Legal Counsel

    Telephone

    0207 201 8252

    Jennifer Cranston

    Legal Counsel

    Telephone

    02072018231

    Last updated 01 May 2024

    Good news – your email swung it for us and the client has now agreed on that crucial point. In typical fashion, they have now raised some further queries, but nothing we can’t get over. We are all but appointed now.