Law Firms

Law Firm Website Design: What the Rules Allow and What Clients Check

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The Innovara mark as a violet sculpture, rim-lit on a glowing pedestal on a dark set

Law firm website design runs into rules most businesses never deal with. The site is advertising, so your bar’s conduct rules govern what it can claim. A contact form that asks the wrong questions can create duties to someone the firm hasn’t agreed to represent. Accessibility law applies as well. And at a firm of 50 or more lawyers, what clients are buying is the lawyers, so the site has to be built around them.

We recently built the site for a Toronto firm that practises charity and tax law. What follows is what we’d tell a managing partner or marketing director before a redesign. We compare the ABA Model Rules with Ontario’s, because putting the two side by side shows where the real limits are. Other states and law societies have their own versions, so read yours.

This isn’t legal advice. Your jurisdiction’s rules and your ethics counsel have the final word.

Who actually reads your website

Most clients don’t find a law firm through its website. They’re told about it, then they check. In FindLaw’s 2024 survey of 2,000 US adults who had a legal need in the past year, 48% of people who learned about the attorney they contacted did so through a referral from family, friends or coworkers. Of those who looked the attorney up online, 97% used a search engine. And 82% of people who contacted an attorney after finding them online used reviews in the decision.

FindLaw sells marketing to law firms and surveys consumers, so the numbers lean toward personal legal matters. We’d expect the same pattern when the client is an organization; the person checking is just a general counsel or an executive director instead of a homeowner. Someone hears your name, searches for it, reads a lawyer’s bio and decides whether to call. Your site has to hold up when they do.

What you can claim

In the US, the starting point is ABA Model Rule 7.1: a lawyer “shall not make a false or misleading communication about the lawyer or the lawyer’s services.” States adopt their own versions, but the comments to 7.1 show how most bars read it. Two of them matter most for a website.

  • Results can mislead even when they’re true. Comment 3 says reporting a lawyer’s achievements for clients “may be misleading if presented so as to lead a reasonable person to form an unjustified expectation that the same results could be obtained for other clients in similar matters without reference to the specific factual and legal circumstances of each client’s case.” A banner of eight-figure verdicts is exactly that risk.
  • Comparisons need support. The same comment says an “unsubstantiated comparison” with other lawyers’ services may mislead if it’s stated specifically enough that a reader would assume it can be proven. “The region’s top tax team” is a comparison.

Comment 3 also says an appropriate disclaimer or qualifying language may keep a statement from misleading. That helps on a results page. It won’t save a claim that’s misleading on its face.

Ontario spells more of this out. Law Society of Ontario rule 4.2-1 lets a lawyer market legal services only if the marketing “is demonstrably true, accurate and verifiable.” The commentary lists marketing that may break the rule, including stating amounts recovered or past success without adding that “past results are not necessarily indicative of future results,” “suggesting qualitative superiority to other lawyers,” and “raising expectations.” It says “awards” and “rankings” are to be read broadly and include “superlative titles such as ‘best’, ‘super’, ‘#1’ and similar indications,” which fall foul of the rule when they aren’t bona fide or are likely to mislead.

“Specialist” has its own rule. In Ontario, rule 4.3-1 says a lawyer “shall not advertise that the lawyer is a specialist in a specified field unless the lawyer has been so certified by the Law Society.” ABA Model Rule 7.2(c) takes a similar line: no claim of certification as a specialist unless an approved or ABA-accredited body certified the lawyer, and the certifying organization has to be named.

These rules push you toward specific copy, which is also the only kind a general counsel can use to compare firms. Drop “leading” and “best.” Say who you act for, the kinds of matters you handle, and what your lawyers have published or taught. If you show results, add the disclaimer your jurisdiction expects and keep each one tied to its facts. On the Toronto site, even routine claims like years in practice or number of clients served went live only after a partner signed off. Keep a source on file for every claim you could be asked to back up.

The site that explains no law

For the Toronto firm we had one rule. The website explains no law. No deadlines, no section numbers, no step-by-step descriptions of a process, no instructions to the reader. It says who the firm acts for, what kinds of matters it handles, who the lawyers are and how to reach them.

The ABA’s thinking points the same way. Its Formal Opinion 10-457 on lawyer websites (2010) says it would be prudent to warn visitors “that the legal information provided is general and should not be relied on as legal advice,” and admits that “no exact line can be drawn between legal information and legal advice.” A tax deadline written into a web page is wrong the day the rule changes, and nobody at the firm may notice. For a firm whose clients are charities with regulatory exposure, the partners decided that risk wasn’t worth the extra search traffic.

Other firms make the opposite call and publish good legal commentary. If you’re one of them, give every article a lawyer’s byline and a date, review it on a schedule, and retire it when the law moves. The version to avoid is an explainer marketing wrote that no lawyer reviewed or signed.

Your intake form can create duties before you’re hired

Opinion 10-457 also looked at what happens when a visitor fills in a form. If a website “specifically requests or invites submission of information concerning the possibility of forming a client-lawyer relationship with respect to a matter,” a visitor who submits it has had a “discussion” under Rule 1.18, the rule on duties to prospective clients, including confidentiality.

Contact details alone are different. According to the opinion, listing a phone number, an email address or a street address “does not create a reasonable expectation that the lawyer is willing to discuss a specific client-lawyer relationship.” A form that asks people to describe their matter is another thing.

Four things follow for the form.

  • Ask only for what you need to run a conflict check and call back. Name, organization, the other parties, a way to reach them. Leave the story for the call.
  • Put the disclaimer above the form. The opinion says disclaimers work “only if reasonably understandable, properly placed, and not misleading,” and that the information “should be conspicuously placed to assure that the reader is likely to see it before proceeding.” Small print under the submit button doesn’t do that.
  • Match the page’s language. The opinion says that if a site uses a particular language, the disclaimer “must be in the same language.” For a bilingual Canadian firm, our reading is that the French pages need the French version.
  • Don’t contradict it. A disclaimer “may be undercut if the lawyer acts or communicates contrary to its warning.” An auto-reply that says “we’ve reviewed your matter” risks doing exactly that.

Where intake data goes

Because a submission may be confidential, treat the form like a client file. Send it to a mailbox or practice-management system the firm controls, not to a marketing tool’s inbox. Keep ad and analytics tags from reading form fields, and check what your form plugin stores in the website database and for how long. Privacy law applies too: in Canada, PIPEDA or a provincial equivalent, and in the US, a growing set of state privacy laws. Your privacy counsel can say which apply to you. Decide where every field ends up before the form goes live.

Lawyer bios

A general counsel choosing outside counsel is choosing a person, so the bio is the page they read closely. Each bio should work on its own for someone who arrives from a search. Put the practice focus in the first line, then the types of clients and matters, bar admissions, publications and talks, and a direct way to reach that lawyer.

Opinion 10-457 has two points on bios. It says biographical information “should be updated on a regular basis” to avoid misleading readers, so a lawyer who left last spring shouldn’t still be listed. And naming current or former clients needs their informed consent. Representative matters grouped by practice area, with no client names, avoid the problem.

Google looks at authorship too. Its guidance on creating helpful content asks whether pages carry a byline where one would be expected and whether the byline leads to more about the author. It also says Google’s systems give even more weight to trust signals for topics that could significantly affect someone’s health, financial stability or safety, and a lot of what law firms publish touches those.

Structure for a firm with many practices

Small-firm templates put everything on a few pages, which stops working once you have 50 lawyers and a dozen practice groups. At that size you need four linked sections: practice areas, industries or client types, people, and insights. Each practice page lists its lawyers and each bio links back to its practices. Articles link to both the practice and the author.

On WordPress that usually means separate content types for lawyers, practices and insights, linked to each other. It takes longer to set up. The payoff comes when a lawyer leaves and you update one record instead of hunting through a dozen pages.

Accessibility law in the US and Ontario

The WebAIM Million 2026 report tested the home pages of the top one million websites and found detectable WCAG failures on 95.9% of them. The six most common problems were low-contrast text (83.9% of pages), missing image alt text (53.1%), missing form input labels (51%), empty links (46.3%), empty buttons (30.6%) and missing document language (13.5%). Watch the form labels in particular. A screen-reader user can’t fill in a field they can’t identify, and on a law firm site that field is probably on the intake form.

The US and Ontario handle this differently. The Department of Justice’s guidance on web accessibility says Title III of the ADA covers businesses open to the public, including what they offer on the web. It also says the Department doesn’t have a regulation setting out detailed standards for businesses, and points to WCAG as helpful guidance. The 2024 rule that set WCAG 2.1 AA deadlines, since pushed to April 2027 and April 2028, covers state and local governments. It doesn’t apply to law firms. A private firm’s risk is a demand letter or a lawsuit, and there’s no compliance date to plan around.

Ontario is stricter. Under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, a business or non-profit with 50 or more employees has had to meet WCAG 2.0 Level AA since January 1, 2021, for web content published after 2012. A 50-lawyer firm, counting its staff, is well past that threshold. We cover the wider picture in our post on accessibility law in 2026.

Search and AI summaries

Many Google searches now show an AI summary above the links. When Pew Research Center tracked the real Google searches of 900 US adults in March 2025, 18% of searches produced one, and people clicked a regular result on 8% of those visits, against 15% when there was no summary.

Google’s own documentation on AI features says “There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary,” and that you don’t need new machine-readable files or AI text files. A page has to be indexed and eligible to appear with a snippet. If you use structured data, it has to match what’s visible on the page.

That leaves the usual work. Write practice pages that answer the questions a client asks when choosing a firm, and bios that list real credentials. Keep pages fast (we wrote about that in site speed as a revenue decision). Settle URL structure and redirects before launch, because they’re hard to change later; there’s more in SEO in web design. If someone sells you a special file that gets a firm into AI answers, ask them to show you where Google says that.

A checklist before you relaunch

  • Every claim is specific, true and signed off by a partner. No “best,” “leading” or “#1” without a bona fide, current source.
  • Results, if shown, carry your jurisdiction’s disclaimer and aren’t presented as typical.
  • Nobody is called a specialist unless the relevant body certified them.
  • The intake form asks only for conflict-check and contact details, with a readable disclaimer above it, in the page’s language.
  • Form submissions go to a system the firm controls, and no ad or analytics tag reads them.
  • Every lawyer has a current bio with practice focus, admissions and a direct contact. Departed lawyers are removed or redirected.
  • Client names appear only with consent.
  • Forms have labels, text has enough contrast, images have alt text, and the page language is set. Test with a keyboard and a screen reader.
  • Old URLs redirect to their new pages at relaunch.

If you’re planning a redesign, we can go through your current site with you. See how we approach brand and website work, or request a site review.

Sources

, CEO and Design Lead, Innovara Studios. Yona leads design at Innovara Studios, from brand identity and product design to the websites the studio builds for clients. How we research and write.