Attorney email signature with a confidentiality disclaimer

Keep it to six or seven lines above the small print:

• Name, with "Esq." or "Attorney at Law" if you use them (one or the other, not both).
• Title: Partner, Associate, Of Counsel, Paralegal. Non-lawyer staff should always state their role.
• Firm name and logo. Signguin reads both from your firm's website.
• One direct phone number. In the Counsel design, only the Phone field shows, so put the number clients should call there.
• Email, website and office address. The address tells clients which office you work from.
• Admission line, if you practice across state lines (see below).
• Confidentiality note at the very bottom, in small gray type.

A sample in the free Classic design:

Nora Ashby, Associate Attorney, Whitfield Brannock LLP. +1 555 0148, nora@whitfieldbrannock-law.com, whitfieldbrannock-law.com, 200 Market St, Suite 900, Hartwell. Admitted in New York and New Jersey. Confidentiality note below.

More layouts by profession: email signature examples.

Pick one, adapt it to your firm and paste it into Legal note / disclaimer. Two or three sentences are enough: a long notice fills a phone screen, and few people read it.

1. Short confidentiality note (Signguin's ready-made "Confidentiality" text):

This email and any attachments are confidential and intended only for the addressee. If you received it by mistake, please tell the sender and delete it.

2. Privileged and confidential:

This email may contain information protected by the attorney-client privilege or as attorney work product. If you are not the intended recipient, please notify the sender and delete it without copying or forwarding it.

3. No attorney-client relationship (useful when you answer inquiries from people who are not clients yet):

Contacting us by email does not create an attorney-client relationship. Please do not send confidential information until we confirm that we can represent you.

4. Admission line plus note: start the legal note with "Admitted in New York and New Jersey." and add one of the notes above on the next line.

A footer is a notice, not a lock. It cannot pull back an email that went to the wrong "Jane" from autocomplete, so check the To line before you send anything sensitive.

If your firm has offices in several states, or you work with clients in other states, one plain line avoids confusion:

• "Admitted in New York and New Jersey"
• "Licensed in California only"
• "Admitted in Illinois. Not admitted in Wisconsin."

Put it in one of two places, both free. A short line can go in the Job title field after your title ("Associate Attorney, admitted in NY and NJ"). A longer one goes as the first line of the legal note, which keeps your line breaks. How your state wants admissions or certifications described is a bar rule, so check yours.

• Client names, matter numbers or case details. Your signature goes on every email, including the ones forwarded outside the firm.
• Results, win rates or client testimonials. These may turn routine email into lawyer advertising under your state's rules. If you use them at all, keep them on your website, where they can be checked against those rules.
• "Specialist", "expert" or "certified" unless your state bar's rules allow it for you. Check them first.
• The old IRS Circular 230 boilerplate. When Treasury and the IRS amended Circular 230 in 2014, they said they expected the amendments to "eliminate the use of a Circular 230 disclaimer in e-mail and other writings" (T.D. 9668, Internal Revenue Bulletin 2014-27, checked October 2026).
• A scanned image of your handwritten signature. Anyone who receives the email can copy it.
• Quotes, emoji and personal social accounts. A LinkedIn profile is fine; the rest can read as casual to a client.
• Three stacked notices. One short note does the job better than a paragraph nobody reads.

More on what makes a signature look professional: professional email signature.

The essentials for a law practice work in the free Classic design: firm logo and colors, your details, the legal note with its ready-made texts, a LinkedIn icon and the Classic (Georgia) font. The legal note sits in the Extras panel next to the button and banner; those two are Premium, the legal note is not. The free version adds a small "Made with Signguin" link at the bottom.

Counsel is the design made for law firms: Georgia serif, an italic title, the firm name in spaced capitals, a short rule in your firm color and contact lines labeled T, E, W and A instead of icons. It has no social icons, by design. Counsel, an optional photo and removing the "Made with Signguin" link are part of Premium, a one-time payment for one person, not a subscription. Saving your signature and editing it later is free: sign in with your email. Other formal designs (Advisor, Minimal, Editorial) are in the email signature templates.

If your firm runs Outlook, click Copy signature in the last step and paste it in: new Outlook and Outlook on the web under Settings, Account, Signatures; classic Outlook for Windows under File, Options, Mail, Signatures. Full steps: how to add a signature in Outlook. On Gmail or Google Workspace, install it straight into Gmail, or see how to change your Gmail signature. If the note or logo goes missing after you paste, try Outlook signature not showing.

Signguin makes one person's signature at a time. If your firm needs every attorney's signature set and locked from an admin console, with the disclaimer enforced centrally, Signguin does not do that yet: there is no team plan, only a waitlist. Each colleague can still make their own free signature with the same logo and note. Other tools: best email signature generators.