A working manual for law firm website content programmes
A law firm website does several jobs. It helps with recruitment, gives journalists something to check, and tells referring firms who to call. But for most firms doing corporate and institutional work, the job that brings in work is narrow. Someone who has already heard the firm’s name, from a colleague, a referring firm or a directory, visits to decide whether to take the next step.
Most habits in website content programmes were sensible responses to the conditions when they began. The conditions have changed. The habits have stayed, because the incentives that keep them alive inside the firm have not.
Let’s take a deep dive into the habits.
“The website is where clients find us”
If we talk about the 2010s, the first law firm websites were brochures and directory listings moved online. Search engines added a second idea: the site should rank for the words clients type. Usually that meant a practice area and a city, often stuffed into partner profiles.
This made sense for some work. People looking for a lawyer for a property dispute or a divorce do search, and firms serving them should optimize for it. Discovery is also easy to measure. Rankings, traffic and enquiry forms all produce numbers a marketing team can report.
But the cost of that generalisation is to lose out on corporate buyers because they, for the most part, do not deploy this kind of a boolean search to find their advisors. A general counsel asks peers, checks directories or is referred, and reaches the site with a name already in mind. What they read is the lawyer’s profile. In one long-running study of global firm websites, between half and three-quarters of all visitors viewed lawyer biographies. Yet profiles are often written by the lawyers themselves, in different formats, and updated when someone remembers. The budget goes to the homepage and to ranking for generic terms, which bring in enquiries the firm doesn’t want. The bigger cost is invisible. A referred client reads a thin profile and quietly calls the other name on their list.
The fix: Treat the site first as an address potential clients visit to qualify, and only second as an address they visit to discover. Look at your own analytics for which pages visitors land on and where they go next. Then test each profile against one question: could someone refer to this lawyer, reading only this page, tell what kind of matters they handle, for what kind of client, and why they are worth a call? Search still matters, but for lawyers’ names and the specific issues a client would research, not for a practice area and a city.
“Redesign it every few years”
A brochure is produced, finished and distributed. Early websites were commissioned the same way. The habit of treating the site as a project, rather than something that is run, has outlived the brochure.
Partnership economics favour this belief as well. A one-off project is approved once, has a visible end, and produces something the management committee can see. A maintenance budget comes out of distributable profit every year and does not produce massive noticeable makeovers. A one-off cost is also easier to control. Faced with that choice, partners choose the project.
The site decays between redesigns. It lists partners beyond their actual term inside the law firm. Lateral hires often appear on the site months after the legal press has reported the move. Practice pages describe work from three years ago. The site is least accurate just before a redesign, and much of the redesign budget goes on rebuilding what maintenance would have kept current. The cost falls hardest on new partners. They are often the people the firm most needs to establish, and they wait longest to exist online.
The fix: Fund maintenance as a small permanent cost with a named owner. Put profiles on a fixed review cycle. Make publishing a lateral hire’s profile part of their joining process, not a marketing task that waits for a free week. A redesign then becomes an occasional decision about structure rather than a periodic rescue.
“Publish on every development, and fast”
Client memos are older than websites. Firms posted and faxed them. The web made them cheap to distribute, and aggregators made the volume visible. The first such widely used platform began republishing law firm content in 1994, and by 2008 it was one of three main services doing so, with the platform where you are reading this blog being the newest. The race was well under way long before the mid-2010s. In India, a regulatory calendar that produces circulars every week keeps it going.
Alerts look cheap, because the associate who drafts them is salaried and the hours aren’t billed. They show the firm is paying attention, and they give partners a reason to email clients. And when every competitor has alerted a new circular by the afternoon, not alerting looks like not knowing.
The associate’s time is not the real input. But what it costs in Partner review time is not a great return on investment. Partner time is the scarcest resource the law firm has. The output is interchangeable with a dozen other firms’ versions of the same summary, so it builds recognition for the category, not for the firm. It also teaches clients to skim everything the firm sends, including the pieces that deserve attention. And a plain summary of a new rule is now exactly what AI tools produce from the rule itself.
The fix: Ask one question of every development: does the firm have anything to add beyond what the text says? If not, send a two-line notice or nothing. If it does, spend the partner time there. That might be what the change means for a particular kind of client, what the firm has seen in practice, or what is likely to happen next. Fewer pieces with a view are read differently from a stream.
“Measure page views”
Analytics dashboards arrived with the volume era, and page views were the first number available.
Marketing teams report to partners who need to see the budget doing something. Page views arrive every month and rise with volume, so they reward the track the firm is already tasking itself on. The information that would show real value is which instructions came from where. That sits in partners’ heads, not in any system the marketing team can read.
Page views reward content that attracts readers who will never instruct: students, job applicants, researchers and competitors. A piece read by thirty general counsel in the right sector is worth more than one read by three thousand students, and the dashboard shows the reverse. The team learns to report activity. The firm can’t tell which pieces helped win work, so it can’t do more of them.
The fix: Track use, not reach. Which pieces did partners send to clients? Which came up in a pitch or a first meeting? Which prompted a question? And at intake, record how each new client came to the firm. It is the cheapest data a firm can collect, and it is often not collected at all.
“Every partner should publish”
Once content became a firm-wide expectation, the work had to be shared out. Quotas, meaning so many pieces per partner or per practice each year, were the administrative answer.
Quotas look fair. No practice is favoured, the burden is spread, and compliance is easy to check. In a firm where partners are paid on their own business, firm-wide content is a shared good that no one wants to fund with their own time. A quota is how the firm gets it funded.
But with that kind of incentive in place, content ends up following the org chart instead of the market. A practice with nothing to say this quarter still produces something. Reluctant authors produce late, safe pieces, and the firm’s weakest writing sits beside its strongest and drags it down. Partner time is spent where it produces least, and withheld from the practice where the market is actually moving.
The fix: Allocate by where the firm has a live position or where the market is moving, and accept that the result will be uneven. A practice with nothing to say should say nothing. That leaves the hardest question in the programme: who decides where the firm has something to say? Partners can’t decide it neutrally, because every allocation affects their own practice. The marketing team usually can’t decide at all, because it takes a reading of both the law and the market. It needs someone who understands both and has no practice of their own to protect. Judge the cost of that person against the partner time they direct, not against the marketing budget. Then recognise good writing the way the firm recognises other non-billable work. A partner who writes one strong piece in a busy quarter should be rewarded, not just counted.
“Industry hubs fix the silo problem”
Somewhere around the pandemic, a later wave of redesigns reorganised sites around industries instead of practice groups. The reasoning was that clients buy by problem, not by the firm’s internal structure.
The reasoning is right. Clients do buy by problem. A hub signals that the firm’s practices work together, and it is a cheap way to show breadth. Internally, it gives every relevant practice a place on the page.
However, many hubs are practice groups with a new label. Listing every partner who has touched a sector weakens the claim: if twenty partners are healthcare specialists, none of them is. Hubs also tend to decay fastest, because they sit between practice budgets and without a clear ownership. And the claim is easy to test. A general counsel who asks who actually works together on healthcare matters will quickly find out whether the hub describes a team or just a page.
The fix: Build a hub only where there is a named owner and a group that genuinely works on matters together. The test is whether the firm could describe three matters where these lawyers worked side by side, even without client names. Where it can’t, a sharper claim about fewer people is more relevant than a generic assertion with a large headcount.
“New formats will fix engagement”
The same redesigns brought the focus on podcasts, video briefings and interactive graphics. The reasoning was that readers were tired of walls of text.
Formats are visible and easy to announce. Some ideas genuinely work better spoken or shown, and some partners explain better than they write.
The detail is in the planning of the programme, though. Every format is a commitment to a schedule and an audience. A podcast that stops after six episodes stays online as a record of something the firm started and dropped. Production is expensive per piece, and the money comes from the same budget that could have paid for fewer, better written pieces. A new format doesn’t change whether there was anything to say. In India there is now a further cost. In July 2026 the Bar Council of India applied its conduct rules to social media, banning named formats built around court and chamber life. A follow-up direction required every State Bar Council to set up a Digital Ethics Committee with its own complaint channel. Formats that are routine for firms abroad can carry disciplinary risk here.
The fix: Choose a format when the idea needs it, and when the partner can keep it going. A walk through a process or a conversation between two people who disagree may need one. Test the idea in writing first. If it doesn’t hold up in six hundred words, it will likely also not hold up on video. In India, check the format against the BCI’s 2026 circular before commissioning it, not after.
“Say as little as possible”
Rule 36 of the Bar Council of India Rules bars advocates from soliciting work or advertising. A 2008 amendment allowed a prescribed set of details online: contact details, enrolment, qualifications and areas of practice. Anything beyond that list is treated as a breach. The click-through disclaimer that opens so many Indian firm sites is a product of that rule.
That is a considerable risk and, in 2026, it is rising. In July the Supreme Court issued notice on a PIL asking it to direct the BCI to act against digital solicitation and promotional content by advocates, and the BCI’s social media circular followed three days later. The line on solicitation is imprecise, and the reputational cost of crossing it is high. When disciplinary action cannot follow from saying too little restraint is the rational default.
Restraint moves the firm’s investment rather than removing it. Budget flows to the parts of the site that feel safe: brand, culture and careers. That is why many Indian sites say more about what it is like to work at the firm than about the work it does. Meanwhile, others describe that work for it. The legal press reports deal credits and lateral moves, and directories publish commentary on practices. The firm has handed the account of its own work to third parties. The cost falls hardest on the visitor with least context. That is often a partner at a foreign firm deciding which Indian firm to refer a client to, reading from outside the market with nothing else to go on.
The fix: Establish exactly where the line sits, instead of treating the whole site as the danger zone. That is a question for the firm’s advisor paying specific attention to the Bar Council rules, item by item, not in general. Then use the permitted space fully, and write it for the reader with least context. The regulator’s own line runs the same way as this manual: the BCI has said its circular permits genuine legal education content while prohibiting promotional, sensational or court-premises content. In India, the safer approach and the more effective one point in the same direction.
“Optimise for AI answers”
This is the newest habit. As general counsel start their research with AI tools, firms are told to structure content so those tools cite them. This is sometimes called Generative Engine Optimisation. (GEO)
The concern is legitimate. Early research is moving to these tools, and a firm absent from their answers may be absent from the shortlist. Vendors sell the service, and it promises a new number to report.
An AI answer built from the firm’s summary gives the reader the value without a visit. A Pew Research Center study of 900 US adults found they clicked a search result link on 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, against 15% without one. They clicked the sources cited inside the summary on just 1% of visits. That study covered US adults generally, not general counsel, but the direction is clear. Being cited is not the same as being instructed. And the content these tools absorb most easily is summaries of rules. They can produce that from the rule itself, so the firm’s version adds little and will be the first to be displaced.
The fix: Keep the technical basics in order. Clean page structure and accurate page information are cheap and worth having. But put the real investment into what an AI tool cannot derive from the primary source: what the firm has seen in practice, the positions it is prepared to take, and the named judgement of its lawyers. And keep investing in the profiles. A general counsel who gets a shortlist from an AI tool still checks the people on it.
What the habits have in common
Each habit survives because the people who approve the budget can see it, or the team that reports to them can count it. A redesign is visible. A homepage is visible. Page views and quotas are countable. The metric of actual relevance here is whether the site helped someone already considering the law firm decide to call. Neither group can see that.
That is why the habits persist, and why fixing them is mostly not a website problem. It is a decision about what the site is for, followed by a decision about what to measure.
The sequencing is to decide which jobs the site does, and for whom; followed by fixing the profiles, because they carry the most commercial weight and cost the least to improve. Then, set the publishing rule: add something, or don’t publish. Change what is measured, from reach to use. Fund maintenance. Only then consider formats and redesigns, which is where many programmes start.
Lawfinity Solutions advises international law firms on cross-border legal market positioning. If the India corridor is a live question for your firm, we would be interested in a conversation. Lawfinity works with one firm per jurisdiction. Engagements begin with a single conversation about your firm’s current position and where the corridor question is live for you. Write to Prachi Shrivastava
