Website builds for law firms

A law firm website answers to two audiences. One is a person with a legal problem, often on a phone, deciding whether this firm handles matters like theirs. The other is the professional conduct rules in the firm's state, which govern what the site may claim.

This page covers the website itself: the page set, where advertising rules show up in the design, intake and accessibility, and how a Hudson South build runs for a firm. The writing that fills those pages has its own home on our law firm content hub.

The page set a firm site usually needs

• Home page: who the firm represents, in which matters, and where, up front.
• One page per practice area: each matter type gets its own URL, its own structured data, and room for its own questions.
• Attorney bios: one page per lawyer, with the matters that lawyer handles, bar admissions, and a direct route to intake.
• Intake page: what happens after someone calls or submits the form.
• Contact and privacy pages: consistent addresses and phone numbers, and what the forms collect.

Fee and results pages are optional, and each is a decision for the partners rather than a template default. Before the sitemap is final, one partner might ask the group, "If a reader lands on our probate page from a search, can they reach the right attorney and the intake form without hunting?" Our note on organizing URLs and page hierarchy covers how those addresses nest.

Where advertising rules show up in the design

Attorney advertising is regulated state by state. The American Bar Association says its Model Rules "serve as models for the ethics rules of most jurisdictions," but the version that binds a firm is its own state's, read by its attorneys or ethics counsel.

Model Rule 7.2(d) requires a communication about a lawyer's services to include "the name and contact information" of at least one lawyer or firm responsible for its content, which on a website usually becomes a footer on every page. Rule 7.2(c) bars stating or implying certification as a specialist unless stated conditions are met, including that the certifying organization is "clearly identified" in the communication, so whether a bio page labels that field "Practice areas" or "Specialties" is a wording call for the firm's reviewer, not the designer.

Rule 7.1 treats a statement as misleading when it "omits a fact necessary to make the statement considered as a whole not materially misleading." Design can create that problem without a false word: a rotating banner of settlement figures, stripped of their facts, is a layout decision. If a firm chooses to show results, the template should give each one room for its context, and disclaimers belong where the firm's reviewer says the state's rules call for them. A footer disclaimer is not a substitute for a page that reads accurately on its own.

Intake, forms and accessibility

A short intake form usually serves best: contact details, the general type of matter, and the names conflict checking needs. What the form says about confidentiality, and whether it asks people to hold back case details for now, is wording the firm's ethics counsel should supply. Submissions are emailed to the firm, and the intake page should say who responds and what happens next.

The Justice Department's Title III regulations name the "office of an accountant or lawyer" among places of public accommodation, and its web guidance states the Department's position that the ADA's requirements apply to all the goods, services, privileges, or activities such businesses offer. It lists inaccessible online forms among common barriers and points to WCAG as helpful guidance. Every build gets automated accessibility checks, which catch some problems, miss others, and are not a legal opinion.

How a firm build runs

The build follows our four steps. Authority Asset gathers the practice areas the firm takes, the matters it declines, each lawyer's admissions, office details, and any results cleared for publication. A designer should not have to guess which cases a firm turns away, so those facts arrive in writing before drafting. Hudson Twenty-One records how the lead attorney explains things, Market Intelligence researches the questions local clients ask about each practice area, and AEO Creation turns those inputs into answer-first pages. The build adds JSON-LD for the firm and its attorneys, an XML sitemap, redirects from old URLs, mobile layout checks and a quality gate on copy, and nothing should launch until the firm's reviewer has read it.

On platform: Netlify for a firm that wants speed, security and low upkeep with us making edits, WordPress for one that wants to log in and post its own blog, and Squarespace for one that wants a simple editor it manages itself.