Law firm web design your responsible lawyer can approve page by page

Someone looking for a lawyer can read a practice area page, a lawyer’s page and the contact page before deciding to call. Law firm web design decides what that person finds at each stop, and what the firm stands behind once it is published.

Is law firm website design right for a firm our size?

Law firm website design scales with the firm, and we plan it at three levels:

• One office: a firm with a few lawyers and a few practice areas, where a single partner may read every page before it goes live.
• Several offices: a regional firm whose site names each office, the lawyers who work there and the matters each office takes.
• A national practice: a firm with an in-house marketing team, lawyers admitted in more than one state, and a review process the build has to fit into.

Our web design page covers how we work for any business; this one covers what changes for a firm.

What changes when the website belongs to a law firm?

The State Bar’s rules on lawyer communications reach the website, and our page on law firm marketing explains them across every channel. In attorney website design, three of them become build decisions:

• A responsible lawyer on every page: rule 7.2(c) asks each advertisement to give the name and address of a lawyer or firm responsible for what it says, so we would build that name and address into the site’s footer, where every page shows it.
• A name, domain and logo that don’t mislead: rule 7.5 holds a firm name, trade name or other professional designation to rule 7.1, and its comment counts logos and URLs as designations. The firm confirms its domain and logo before design starts.
• Phrases the build refuses: our sites run a must-not-say check that stops the build when a page holds a phrase on its blocked list. On a firm’s site, that list would include a promised outcome, and “certified specialist” beside any lawyer the firm hasn’t confirmed as certified.

We aren’t lawyers, and none of this is legal advice: the firm’s lawyers decide what its pages say.

How should a law firm site be organized by practice area?

Law firm website design starts from the words people type when they need a lawyer, grouped by practice area into a page plan. Each practice area page says which matters the firm takes, where it takes them and which lawyers handle them, and each lawyer’s page links back to the areas that lawyer practices.

Some practices bring marketing needs of their own, covered on our pages for family lawyers, personal injury lawyers, criminal defense lawyers and immigration lawyers.

Pages for places need more care than pages for practice areas. Google’s spam policies describe pages aimed at particular cities or regions that funnel visitors to a single page as doorway abuse, along with “substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clearly defined, browseable hierarchy”. In law firm website design, that means a page for each office the firm staffs, and no run of city pages that differ only by the city’s name.

What should web design for lawyer profile pages include?

A lawyer’s own page is where a prospective client checks who they would be working with. On each one we would include:

• A title with the lawyer’s name: Google’s guidance on title links warns against vague descriptors like “Profile” for a person’s page, so the title names the lawyer and the firm.
• A photograph of that lawyer: the firm’s own picture of the person the page describes.
• Bylines that connect: Google encourages accurate authorship information such as bylines, so each article names the lawyer who wrote it and links to that lawyer’s page.
• Languages and certifications in the State Bar’s terms: comment 5 to rule 7.1 lets a page say a lawyer serves clients in a language other than English only when the lawyer can, or when the page gives the speaker’s job title, and rule 7.4 sets the conditions for the words “certified specialist”, the certifying body’s name among them.
• A route to that lawyer: the office the lawyer works from, and the inquiry form already set to the lawyer’s practice area.

That is the heart of lawyer web design: every profile describes a real person, and the firm answers for what it says.

Can the site mention verdicts, settlements and awards?

Comment 4 to rule 7.1 says a truthful report of a lawyer’s achievements for clients, or a testimonial or endorsement, may still mislead if it leads a reasonable person to expect the same result in another matter without reference to the facts of each case.

SB 37 adds to that. The Senate Judiciary Committee’s analysis of April 2025 describes a bill that bars an advertisement from:

• Predicting success: any prediction of success in the legal matter.
• Citing results without support: past results, unless they are objectively verifiable and leave out no fact that would make them misleading.
• Naming some awards: recognition or an award from an organization that is neither recognized within the legal profession as bona fide nor free of any fee or payment for it.

The Governor’s office listed SB 37 among the bills signed on October 11, 2025. Our reading rests on the committee’s description of the bill, so the firm’s counsel should confirm the signed text before a results page, a verdict figure or an award logo goes live. In the build, each result is an entry the firm writes and approves, with room for the context and disclaimer the firm chooses.

How do you make a law firm site accessible?

Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act lists the office of an accountant or lawyer among the places of public accommodation. The Justice Department’s guidance on web accessibility says the Department has consistently taken the position that the ADA’s requirements apply to everything a public accommodation offers, including what it offers on the web, and that businesses have flexibility in how they comply. It names the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and the Section 508 Standards as helpful guidance. The current version, WCAG 2.2, became a W3C Recommendation on 12 December 2024.

The guidance’s examples of barriers are poor color contrast, information given by color alone, images without text alternatives, videos without captions, forms without labels or clear instructions, and navigation that only works with a mouse. It also warns that a “clean” report from an automated checker doesn’t necessarily mean everything is accessible, and suggests pairing a manual check with the tools. Our website accessibility service audits a site to WCAG 2.2 Level AA, by hand as well as with a scanner, and fixes what fails. Whether the site meets the firm’s legal duties is a question for the firm’s counsel.

Which parts of the build do visitors never see?

Our own build system sits under the site, on Astro or Next.js. Astro’s documentation describes it as the web framework for building content-driven websites, which suits a site made of many practice area and lawyer pages. Four parts of a law firm website design sit underneath the pages:

• Structured data: Google describes structured data as explicit clues about the meaning of a page; ours describes the firm, its offices and its lawyers.
• Sitemaps and IndexNow: a sitemap lists every page, and IndexNow tells the search engines that support it, Bing among them, when a page changes.
• Crawler rules and llms.txt: a robots file that sets which crawlers may read the site, AI crawlers included, and an llms.txt file for the tools that read one.
• Launch guards: the build stops if a page is still marked as a draft or carries a fact waiting on the firm.

Does a new site put the firm’s domain or email at risk?

Not when only the website moves. Before launch we save a copy of the firm’s DNS records. At launch, the only records that change are the ones pointing the website to its new host; the registrar, the nameservers and the email records stay as they were.

The old site’s addresses get a redirect map: every page, old practice area pages and articles included, matched to its closest new page and redirected permanently. Google’s documentation says a permanent redirect shows the new target in search results and that a server-side redirect has the highest chance of being interpreted correctly, so ours run on the server. Our pages on website redesign and website migration cover the move in more detail.

How do Google’s AI features treat a law firm site?

Google’s page on AI features says that showing in AI Overviews or AI Mode carries “no additional requirements”. What Google asks of a page there is what it asks in regular Search, that it be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet, and no new machine-readable file, AI text file or special schema.org markup is needed. Visits from those features are counted in Search Console’s Performance report, under the “Web” search type.

Search Console also has a setting, the Search generative AI control, that decides whether a site’s links and content can appear in those features, and our page on law firm SEO explains it.

What we build makes a firm’s site easier for AI answers to find, read and cite. No one controls which firm an AI tool names, so we don’t promise a mention; our GEO work covers what can be measured.

Can we see a website you’ve built?

The site we can show is the Alvy Logistics website, a 70-page rebuild on Astro in our own build system, which we built and run with Alvy. Alvy is owned by our co-founder Noah Alvarez, and DSI is an Alvy company. Alvy moves freight, so the site shows how we plan, write and build a site of that size and says nothing about legal marketing. A law firm’s site would go through the same system and the same launch checks.

Who keeps the site current when lawyers and rules change?

Law firm website design doesn’t stop at launch, because a firm’s site changes whenever the firm does: a lawyer joins or leaves, a practice area opens or closes, an office moves, or a rule such as SB 37 changes what the pages may say. Each change means pages to add, retire or redirect, and wording to check again.

Once the site is live, we keep running it on a monthly plan, and your proposal sets what the plan covers. For upkeep in general, see our website maintenance page; the website design cost guide shows what builds cost in the market, and our guide to choosing a web design company lists the questions to ask any agency.

Formed in 2023, Midnite Systems works with businesses across the US from our office in Valencia. To talk about the firm’s site, book a 15-minute call.