A prospective client has three firm websites open in three tabs at eleven at night. One talks about excellence and passion. One has a stock photo of a gavel and a phone number. The third explains what happens in the first meeting, roughly what it costs and who will actually handle the matter. Guess which one gets the enquiry in the morning.
Lawyers in England and Wales and in the United States are allowed to market themselves, and most of them should do more of it. But the professional conduct rules are specific about what you must publish, what you may not claim and how you may approach people. This guide walks through those rules as they affect a website, then covers SEO, paid advertising, enquiry forms and confidentiality, accessibility and multilingual sites.
What the regulators actually expect
In England and Wales, solicitors and SRA-regulated firms work under the SRA Standards and Regulations. The Code of Conduct for Solicitors requires that any publicity about your practice is accurate and not misleading, including what it says about your charges (paragraph 8.8). Paragraph 8.9 bars unsolicited approaches to members of the public to advertise your services, with an exception for current and former clients. Separately, the SRA Transparency Rules set out what has to appear on your website.
In the US, each state adopts its own version of the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct. The advertising rules were reorganised in 2018: Rule 7.1 prohibits false or misleading communications, Rule 7.2 now holds the specific rules (including those on paying for recommendations and on claiming to be a certified specialist) and Rule 7.3 deals with solicitation. Former Rules 7.4 and 7.5 were deleted and folded into the others. Several states never adopted the 2018 changes in full, so the number on the rule you are reading may not match the Model Rules.
UK: what the Transparency Rules require on your website
Since December 2018, SRA-regulated firms that publish that they offer certain services must publish price and service information for them. The list is specific, and many firms are caught by one line of it without noticing.
- For individuals: residential conveyancing, uncontested probate, immigration applications and First-tier Tribunal immigration appeals (excluding asylum), summary-only road traffic offences in the magistrates' court, and employment tribunal claims for unfair or wrongful dismissal brought by employees.
- For businesses: defending employment tribunal claims for unfair or wrongful dismissal, debt recovery up to a set value, and licensing applications for business premises.
For each of those services the rules expect the total cost, or an average or range where a single figure is not practicable, the basis of your charges, likely disbursements, whether VAT applies, what the price includes and excludes, the key stages and likely timescales, and the experience and qualifications of the people doing and supervising the work. The information has to be clear, accessible and prominently placed. A PDF buried three clicks deep does not meet that standard.
| Requirement | Who it applies to | Where it belongs on the site |
|---|---|---|
| Price and service information | Firms publishing that they offer the listed services | On the relevant service page, not only in a downloadable document |
| Complaints procedure | All SRA-regulated firms with a website | A dedicated page, including how and when to complain to the Legal Ombudsman and the SRA |
| SRA number and digital badge | SRA-authorised bodies | Prominently, typically in the footer of every page |
| SRA number and regulated-by statement | All firms authorised by the SRA | Letterheads and emails, including automated email replies |
US: advertising rules and the states that go further
Rule 7.1 is the one most website copy runs into. A truthful statement can still be misleading if it creates unjustified expectations, which is why many firms are careful with case results. Listing settlements on a page called Results, without context, invites exactly that criticism. Some states go further and require disclaimers about past results, specific labels on advertising, or filing certain advertisements with the bar for review; Florida and Texas are well-known examples of review schemes.
Rule 7.2 restricts giving anything of value for a recommendation, with exceptions such as paying the reasonable cost of advertising. That matters for lead generation services and directory placements: paying for an ad is one thing, paying per referred client is another, and states draw that line differently. The same rule says you may not state or imply that you are a certified specialist unless you have been certified by an organisation approved by the state or accredited by the ABA, and the certifying body must be named.
Rule 7.3 targets live person-to-person solicitation where a significant motive is the lawyer's financial gain. Email, text messages and website chat are generally treated differently because the recipient can ignore them, but ABA Formal Opinion 501 makes clear that you remain responsible when employees or lead generators solicit on your behalf.
SEO and content: useful without making promises
Legal topics fall into what Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines call Your Money or Your Life content, where accuracy and demonstrable expertise matter more than usual. The firms that do well in organic search tend to publish what clients genuinely want to know: what the process looks like, how long each stage usually takes, what documents to prepare, what it might cost and when to call a lawyer at all.
A few habits separate good legal content from filler. Name the author and give their real qualifications. Show when the page was last reviewed. Say which jurisdiction it covers; a page on divorce that does not mention whether it applies to England and Wales or Scotland is a page Google and readers both have reason to doubt. And keep explaining rather than promising: an article that says you will win is a conduct problem, an article that explains what affects the outcome is a resource.
Local search and reviews
For high-street practices, Google Business Profile is often the busiest page the firm has. Use the firm's real-world name without keywords added to it; Google's guidelines prohibit that and it looks cheap. Google also allows individual practitioners such as lawyers to have their own profiles, which can help a partner known by name, but agree internally how those profiles are managed when people leave.
Asking clients for reviews is fine. Buying them, writing them yourself or offering an incentive without disclosing it is not: the UK's Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 put fake and concealed incentivised reviews on the banned list, and the US Federal Trade Commission's rule on consumer reviews and testimonials does the same. Some state bars add their own conditions on testimonials, so check before quoting a client on your site.
Paid search and social: allowed, with traps
Google Ads is the fastest way for a firm to appear for urgent searches such as police station advice or an employment dispute, and legal terms are among the more expensive clicks in most markets. The conduct rules apply to every ad exactly as to the website: no superlatives you cannot evidence, no implied outcomes, and a landing page that matches what the ad promised. If the ad mentions a fixed fee, the landing page needs to explain what it covers.
Social advertising raises a quieter issue: data. A retargeting pixel on a page about criminal defence or immigration status can signal sensitive information about the visitor to an advertising platform. Under UK GDPR, criminal offence data and special category data carry extra conditions, so many firms keep advertising pixels off those pages entirely and run Consent Mode v2 so that tags respect the visitor's cookie choice. In the UK, PECR applies to cookies and to email marketing.
General advertising is not an unsolicited approach under the SRA's rules. Targeting identifiable individuals is a different matter: cold-calling people after an accident, messaging someone directly because they posted about a dispute, or approaching people at a hospital or court. That is where firms get into trouble.
Enquiry forms, confidentiality and prospective clients
The enquiry form is where marketing meets professional duty. People will type the whole story into a text box: the other party's name, a medical history, details of an arrest. Under ABA Model Rule 1.18, a lawyer can owe duties to a prospective client, and ABA Formal Opinion 10-457 addresses lawyer websites specifically: if your site invites people to submit information, you need to be clear about whether that information will be treated as confidential and whether submitting it creates a lawyer-client relationship.
- Keep the form short: name, contact details, type of matter and a brief note is enough for a first response.
- Say plainly above the form that submitting it does not make the person a client and that they should not send confidential details until you have confirmed you can act.
- Run a conflict check before anyone replies with substance; the other party's name in the first message is the reason this matters.
- Do not offer a file upload field on a public form. Set up a secure channel once the matter is accepted.
- Route submissions into a system with access controls rather than plain email, and keep the notification email free of the enquiry text.
- Record where form data is stored and which processors handle it, and put that in your privacy notice.
Accessibility, speed and the basics that build trust
Clients in a legal crisis are often stressed, on a phone and reading in a second language. A site that is slow, cramped or hard to use with a screen reader loses them. WCAG 2.2 level AA is the sensible target; in the UK the Equality Act 2010 makes accessibility part of your duty to make reasonable adjustments, and in the US website accessibility claims under the Americans with Disabilities Act are a familiar source of litigation. If you sell legal services online directly to consumers in the EU, check whether the European Accessibility Act, applicable since June 2025, reaches that part of your site.
The rest is unglamorous but visible. Pages that load quickly on mobile, readable type, phone numbers that work as tap-to-call links, HTTPS everywhere, and a content management system that someone actually updates. A compromised law firm website showing a fake payment notice is a far bigger problem than an old design.
Multilingual sites for international clients
Firms advising international clients often need English plus one or two other languages. The common mistake is translating the marketing and forgetting the regulatory layer. Every language version needs to say which jurisdiction the firm practises in, which regulator it answers to and how complaints work, in words that make sense to that reader.
- Use separate URLs per language (for example /de/ or /ar/) and connect them with hreflang annotations.
- Have legal content translated or reviewed by a lawyer fluent in the language; machine translation gets terms of art wrong in ways clients notice.
- Use titles accurately. Solicitor is a protected title in England and Wales; a lawyer qualified elsewhere should describe their actual qualification rather than borrowing a local one.
- Test right-to-left layouts, fonts and form fields separately if you publish in Arabic.
- Remember that the other jurisdiction's rules may apply to communications aimed at its residents, and they can be stricter than your own.
Where to start
- List every service you say you offer and check it against the Transparency Rules categories or your state's advertising rules.
- Publish or update price and service information on the relevant pages, with stages, timescales and who does the work.
- Make sure the complaints page, the SRA number and the live digital badge appear where they should, or the equivalent disclosures your bar requires.
- Remove claims you cannot evidence: superlatives, unqualified case results, specialist titles without certification.
- Rebuild the enquiry form with minimal fields, a clear disclaimer, conflict checks and secure storage.
- Review tracking and advertising tags on sensitive practice area pages and set up Consent Mode v2 for UK and EU visitors.
- Write or refresh practice area guides with named authors, jurisdiction labels and review dates.
- Check accessibility and speed on a mobile phone, then repeat the whole review at least once a year.
At AYTE Digital, when we work with law firms we start by reading the existing site against the rules that apply to it, then build a fast, accessible and well-measured site around content the firm's own lawyers approve. We do not write promises into legal marketing, and final sign-off on every page stays with the firm.
