Content for personal injury law firms

Someone who searches for a personal injury lawyer is usually hurt, behind on work, and fielding calls from an insurance company they do not trust. They are not comparing firms on a spreadsheet. They want to know whether calling a lawyer makes sense, what it costs if the case goes nowhere, and what will be asked of them next.

Many personal injury sites lead with a different answer: how much the firm has recovered. This page covers what injured people ask before they call, the fee and solicitation rules that touch personal injury content specifically, and the gaps that show up on most personal injury sites. It builds on our overview for law firms.

What injured people ask before they call

The early questions are about risk. Do I even have a case? Will I owe anything if we lose? Do I have to go to court? Should I talk to the adjuster who keeps calling? Who pays my medical bills while this is open? How long until it is over? The answers depend on the facts, but a firm can still explain how it evaluates a case, what it asks for at the first meeting, and what usually decides whether a claim settles or goes further.

Intake staff hear these questions every day, usually in fragments. A useful exercise for a managing partner is to sit in on a week of intake calls and then ask the team, "When a caller goes quiet, what were they about to ask?" Hesitation often points at cost or at fear of the process, two subjects worth checking your own pages against. Our post on the questions personal injury websites leave for intake lays out how to move those answers onto the site.

The fee and solicitation rules behind personal injury pages

Contingent fees are the subject personal injury content mentions most and explains least. ABA Model Rule 1.5(c) says a contingent fee agreement "shall be in a writing signed by the client" and must state the percentages for "settlement, trial or appeal," the expenses to be deducted, and "whether such expenses are to be deducted before or after the contingent fee is calculated." It also requires the agreement to notify the client of any expenses they owe "whether or not the client is the prevailing party." A fee percentage is not a fee explanation. When a page says the firm is paid only if the client recovers, a reviewer may reasonably ask whether case expenses are addressed too, and that is a question to put to the firm's ethics counsel under its own state's version of the rules.

Solicitation is the other recurring issue. Model Rule 7.3 restricts soliciting work through "live person-to-person contact" when a significant motive is the lawyer's or law firm's pecuniary gain, with narrow exceptions. The ABA comment says a communication is not solicitation if it is directed to the general public, such as a website, or is "in response to a request for information." Model Rule 7.2 also limits giving "anything of value to a person for recommending the lawyer's services," which is worth raising with counsel before signing with any lead vendor. States vary on each of these points.

Where personal injury content usually falls short

Three gaps are worth checking for. Results pages can list dollar amounts with no facts attached, so a reader cannot tell what the number says about their own case. Accident pages (car, truck, motorcycle, slip and fall) may describe the accident type in general terms and say almost nothing about how this firm handles one. City pages sometimes repeat the same text with a different town name, which serves no reader in any of those towns.

The fixes need facts that only the firm has. Consider a fictional personal injury firm in Georgia that handles trucking cases but refers out medical malpractice. That boundary belongs on the site, along with what the firm asks a new client to bring and how it decides whether to file suit. Nobody writing for that firm should have to make those things up; they come from the attorneys and the intake team before drafting begins.