A law firm website has a constraint almost no other business has: what it may claim is regulated. Bar advertising rules govern testimonials, past results, superlatives, and specialisation language, and they vary by state. Most legal websites were designed by people who have never read them, and it shows in exactly the copy a regulator would look at first.
Website design for US law firms. Structured by practice area, built for intake, and written to respect the advertising rules your bar actually enforces.
Guarantees, unqualified superlatives, past results without context, and loose use of 'specialist' are the recurring problems. The ABA Model Rules govern communications about a lawyer's services and states adapt them differently — the copy has to be written with that in mind, not corrected afterwards.
Someone facing a DUI and someone in a custody dispute share nothing. Each practice area needs its own page with its own process, timeline, and questions, or the firm competes for none of those searches properly.
Legal enquiries are urgent and shopped fast. A slow response is a lost client, so intake needs to be short, mobile-first, routed immediately, and honest about what happens next.
Clients hire a person. Admissions, courts, case types handled, and the years doing it matter more than a paragraph of firm history — and they are among the strongest legitimate trust signals available.
Past outcomes are persuasive and regulated. Where results are shown, the framing and disclaimers have to travel with them, and the design has to place them where they are actually read.
Prospective clients search in plain, frightened language, not in statute names. Practice-area pages written in the client's words get found and get read; the same content in legal register does neither.
Structured by practice area, built for intake speed, and written with the advertising rules in view.
A page per practice area with its own process, timeline, and questions — the structure that lets a firm rank for each rather than none.
Claims, superlatives, specialisation language, and results framing written with bar advertising rules in view, and flagged for your review before publication.
Admissions, courts, case types, and experience presented as the trust signals they are, each with a direct contact path.
Short, mobile-first enquiry forms that route immediately and set expectations about response time and confidentiality.
Pages written in the words a worried person actually types, rather than in the statute or the firm's internal terminology.
Where outcomes are published, the framing and disclaimers designed to sit with them rather than be buried in a footer.
Each office with its own page, hours, and directions, marked up so search engines associate the right details with the right place.
Contrast, focus order, and semantic structure handled during design, where they cost nothing, rather than retrofitted.
Almost every other business can write whatever marketing copy it likes and risk only embarrassment. A law firm cannot. What it may say about itself is governed by the rules of professional conduct in every state it practises in.
The ABA Model Rules address communications concerning a lawyer's services, and states adopt and modify them individually — which is why a firm licensed in three states cannot simply copy what a competitor in a fourth is doing. The recurring problems are predictable: implied guarantees, unqualified superlatives, past results presented without context, and describing an attorney as a specialist where the state restricts that term.
We are designers, not your ethics counsel, and we say so plainly. What we do is write and structure the site so the questions are surfaced rather than buried, flag the copy that typically needs review, and build in the places where disclaimers have to sit. Your compliance review then has something sensible to review, instead of a finished site full of problems.
Looking to rank rather than redesign? Legal SEO services is handled by Optima, our SEO division.
The advertising rules. What a firm may claim about itself is regulated by the rules of professional conduct in each state where it practises — covering testimonials, past results, superlatives, and specialisation language. That constraint shapes the copy and the layout, and it is the part most web designers have never encountered.
We design and write with the rules in view, and we flag the copy that typically needs your review — claims, results, superlatives, and specialist language. We are not your ethics counsel and will not pretend to be. What we deliver is a site where those questions are visible and reviewable rather than buried in finished copy.
Yes, without exception. A DUI client and a custody client share no vocabulary, no urgency, and no concerns. Separate pages let each rank for its own searches and answer its own questions, and they are the difference between a firm that appears for its practice areas and one that appears for its own name.
In many states yes, with appropriate context and disclaimers, and the specifics vary by jurisdiction. The design question is where those disclaimers sit so they are genuinely read rather than technically present. We build the placement in and leave the decision about which results to publish with you and your compliance review.
It is frequently the whole competition. Legal enquiries are urgent and prospective clients contact several firms in an afternoon. A short mobile form that routes immediately, plus clarity about when someone will respond, converts markedly better than a long form and a promise to be in touch.
Around what a client is actually assessing: admissions, courts appeared in, case types handled, and years doing it. Clients hire a person rather than a firm, and these are legitimate, verifiable trust signals — unlike superlatives, which are both weaker persuasion and the copy most likely to attract a compliance problem.
Separate service. This page is the website; legal search sits with Optima, which has a legal hub plus spokes for personal injury, DUI, criminal defense, and divorce and family law. Most firms want both, quoted separately.
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