The University of Law has been forced to withdraw adverts claiming its graduates could expect to earn an average of £54,000 a year in their first five years of practice.

In a ruling today, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said that it has received complaints about two different adverts, from a university law lecturer and a retired university law professor.

The former questioned whether the adverts’ claims about potential earnings for junior lawyers could be substantiated, while the latter questioned whether a claim in a separate advert that the University of Law was “the UK’s leading law school” was misleading.

The ASA ruled that the two advertisements must not appear again.

It said: “We told the University of Law and [the university’s marketing agency] Marketing VF not to make claims about the potential earnings of lawyers unless they held adequate evidence to substantiate the claims, and to ensure that their marketing communications were obviously identifiable as such.”

“We also told the University of Law not to make claims that they were the “leading” law school in the UK unless they held adequate substantiation, and, if such claims were based on the number of places or students enrolled, that the claim was clearly qualified to that effect.”