Updated August 2026 · Reviewed by Adams, Cameron & Co.
Blanks on an approved form, and essentially nothing else. Under the Rules Regulating The Florida Bar it is not the unlicensed practice of law for a nonlawyer to engage in limited oral communications to help someone complete the blanks on a legal form approved by the Supreme Court of Florida. Those communications are confined to what is reasonably necessary to elicit factual information for the blanks and to explain how to file the form. The rule then says the part agents skip: the nonlawyer may not give legal advice, and may not advise on remedies or courses of action. Changing the form, adding a clause of your own, or drafting a separate instrument is a different activity altogether.
- The permission is narrow and specific: limited oral communications to elicit factual information for the blanks on an approved form, and to explain how to file it.
- The same rule states the limit: a nonlawyer may not give legal advice, nor advise on remedies or courses of action.
- Drafting instruments is out. Florida Bar Opinion 67-14 concluded that a broker may not draft a deed, citing Keyes Co. v. Dade County Bar Association, 46 So.2d 605 (Fla. 1950).
- Filling in and rewriting are different acts. Completing a blank is permitted; altering the printed language of a form, or writing your own addendum, moves you across the line.
- The safest sentence in the job is that this is a question for your attorney, and it costs you nothing to say it.
Every agent does this daily and almost nobody has read where the boundary is. The contract has blanks; you fill them in; the client asks what a paragraph means; you explain it, because not explaining it feels unhelpful and slightly rude.
That last step is the one with a rule attached.
The permission, quoted narrowly
Under the Rules Regulating The Florida Bar, it is not the unlicensed practice of law for a nonlawyer to engage in limited oral communications to assist a person in completing the blanks on a legal form approved by the Supreme Court of Florida.
Two constraints are built into that sentence. The communications must be reasonably necessary to elicit the factual information needed to complete the blanks, and to tell the person how to file the form. And the form has to be an approved one. This is why the standard contracts used in Florida residential practice matter so much: an agent working inside an approved form is standing on the permission, and an agent who has typed up something bespoke is not.
The limit, stated in the same rule
The nonlawyer may not give legal advice, and may not advise on remedies or courses of action.
Sit with the second half, because it is broader than it first appears. Advice on courses of action covers a great deal of ordinary, well-intentioned conversation:
- What this clause means for you.
- Whether you can get out of this.
- What happens if they miss that date.
- Whether you should send a notice or wait.
- Whether that inspection finding is a material defect they have to disclose.
Each of those is a question a real client asks in a real car on the way to a showing, and each one is asking you for a course of action. The honest answer is a referral, not a guess.
Drafting is the bright line
Florida Bar Opinion 67-14 concluded that the law of Florida is that a broker may not draft a deed, citing Keyes Co. v. Dade County Bar Association, 46 So.2d 605 (Fla. 1950). That case is the origin of the modern division: a licensee operating inside the sale transaction with an approved contract form is in one position, and a licensee producing legal instruments is in another.
The practical translation for a working agent is a distinction between two verbs.
- Completing a blank that the form was designed to have filled in. Permitted.
- Composing language that was not on the form. Not your job, whether it goes in a margin, an addendum or a separate document.
The uncomfortable cases sit between them, and the most common is the client who asks you to change a printed term. Striking a sentence and writing a replacement is composing, even though it happens on a form and takes eleven seconds.
Where agents actually cross it
Almost never by drafting a deed. Nobody sets out to do that. The realistic failures are smaller:
- Interpreting. Being asked what a clause means and answering. Reading the clause aloud is not the same as explaining its effect.
- Recommending. Telling a client whether to terminate, extend, demand or wait. That is advice on a course of action in the rule sense.
- Rewriting. Amending printed terms rather than using the mechanism the form provides for it.
- Predicting. Telling a client they will get their deposit back. That prediction has a statutory process behind it and you are not part of it, as set out in what happens when buyer and seller both claim the deposit.
- Filling silence. The client asked, they are looking at you, and saying you do not know feels like failing. This is the real mechanism behind almost every instance.
What to say instead, in actual words
The referral is the skill, and it can be done without sounding evasive.
- I can tell you what the paragraph says. What it means for your situation is a question for an attorney, and I would rather you got that right than fast.
- That is a legal question and I am not able to answer it, which is not me being careful with myself. It is that a wrong answer from me would cost you real money.
- Here is what I can do: I will get you the document, mark the paragraph, and you can have somebody look at it today.
Clients almost never object to this. They object to vagueness. A confident referral reads as competence, and a confident guess reads that way too, right up until it is wrong.
How this interacts with the rest of the rules
Two neighboring boundaries are worth holding in the same part of your head.
Disclosure duties are a place where the legal and the practical meet, and where an agent explaining another party's obligations can drift into advising on them, and the Florida position is set out in Florida seller property disclosure requirements.
And the same instinct that produces unauthorized legal advice produces unauthorized everything else. An unlicensed assistant answering a question they should not is the same failure mode one rung down, which is why the boundaries in what an unlicensed assistant may and may not do read so similarly to this page.
What to ask a brokerage
- Who reviews an addendum before it goes out, and how quickly?
- Is there an attorney the firm refers clients to, or am I improvising that at eight in the evening?
- What does the firm expect me to say when a client asks what a clause means?
A brokerage with real answers here is providing something that never appears on a recruiting sheet, and it sits alongside the rest of what a brokerage actually provides.
The short version
Fill in the blanks on the approved form, and say what is needed to collect the facts for them. Do not interpret, do not recommend a course of action, do not rewrite printed language, and do not draft instruments. When the question goes past the blank, the correct answer is a name and a phone number.
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