Sectors · Guides
Law firm website design
Published
Most law firm websites are organised around the firm. Clients arrive organised around their problem, and the gap between those two things is where the enquiries are lost.
Nobody wakes up wanting a solicitor. They want a house purchase to complete, a dispute to end, an estate settled, a dismissal dealt with. By the time they reach a firm's website they are usually somewhere between mildly stressed and genuinely frightened, and they are trying to work out two things quickly: do these people do my specific thing, and can I afford them.
Practice areas are the site, not a menu item
Each practice area deserves a real page written for that client, not a paragraph on a shared services page. A conveyancing client and an employment client have nothing in common. They use different words, arrive with different worries and make the decision on a different timescale, and a page trying to reassure both will land with neither.
Write each one in the client's language rather than the profession's. People search for what happens if I die without a will, not intestacy, and a page that meets them at the first phrasing can lead them to the second.
People, rather than a team page
In professional services the individual is much of what is being bought. Give fee earners their own pages: a photograph that looks like them on a normal day, the work they actually do rather than a full CV, how long they have been doing it, and a direct way to reach them.
A grid of headshots with job titles underneath is not a team page, it is a seating plan. It tells a worried client nothing about who will pick up their file.
Price transparency, and why it helps anyway
Regulated firms in England and Wales have had duties to publish price and service information for certain areas of work since the SRA transparency rules came in, and both the specified areas and the detail have moved since then. Check the current position with the regulator rather than copying whatever a competitor has on their site, which may be years out of date.
Beyond compliance, it is worth doing well. Cost is the question clients most want answered and least like asking, and the firm that answers it clearly gets a disproportionate share of the enquiries, because most of the profession is still hiding behind please contact us for a quote.
Write for somebody who is worried
Tone does more work here than in any other sector covered in these guides. Short sentences. Plain words. Say what happens next and in what order, because uncertainty about process is most of what makes legal problems frightening. A page that explains the first three steps of a matter is doing more for conversion than any amount of copy about the firm's heritage.
The enquiry is not a sale, it is a conversation
The form should ask for very little: what the matter is about, and how to reach them. Detailed intake belongs in the call, partly because it converts better and partly because a public form is not the right place for somebody to type sensitive detail about a dispute or a bereavement.
Make sure the routing works. An enquiry about probate that lands in a general inbox and waits two days has failed, and in a sector where clients ring three firms, response time is often the whole decision.
Where to go next
The measurement principles in SEO for tradesmen apply here despite the different sector: the enquiry is the number that matters, not the session count. The general build principles are in web design for trades.
