Local & Industries · 10 min read · September 24, 2026 · Hafsa Tariq, gaash.ai
Practice-area pages for a law firm: the matter, the place and the fee, stated so an answer can use them
A person with a legal problem asks an assistant for a lawyer the way they would ask a friend: this matter, this place, this budget. An answer can only use what the pages it reads say. A firm whose site names the matter, the county and how it charges has given an answer something to use. A firm that says "full-service" gives it nothing a person would type.
How a legal question reaches an assistant
It arrives with the matter, the place and often the money in it. "employment lawyer in Phoenix for a wrongful termination, I was let go two weeks after reporting my manager", "immigration attorney in Toronto who handles spousal sponsorship", "estate planning attorney near Naperville that does a free first meeting", "how do DUI lawyers in Denver charge, flat fee or hourly". Then, once names are on the table: "does this firm take contingency cases", "which counties does this firm practice in", "do they have someone who speaks Spanish".
The person is asking for a lawyer, not for legal advice, and what the AI assistant gives back is general information about the kind of matter and then, because the person asked for a lawyer, an AI recommendation: it names firms. The names come from pages it retrieved at the moment of asking: firm sites, bar directories, review sites, local news. The firm named is the one whose page reads as an answer to that question, and the question was specific.
We measured one narrow slice of this. In our audit of 9,483 small business websites (40 trades, 90 metros in the US, Canada, Europe and the UAE, late August to early September 2026) we put one buyer question per business to Claude with web retrieval on, 9,240 questions in all. 99.4% of the names it gave were businesses; 0.6% were directories or aggregators. One assistant, one question each, one day: directional, not a rate. But it is the reverse of a search results page: the names in these answers were firms, not the directories that list them.
Why specific language gives an answer more to use
An answer written from fetched pages can only say what those pages say. A legal question arrives with four or five specific terms in it, and a page that states those terms in sentences gives the answer something to say about the firm. "Wrongful termination" on a page speaks to a wrongful termination question. "Employment matters" speaks to it less. "We handle all your legal needs" speaks to nothing a person types.
That is the case for a page per practice area: it lets a firm state, in the vocabulary of the matter, what a question in that area asks about. Its whole site is written in the vocabulary of that matter: the sub-types (unpaid overtime, severance review, retaliation), the forum (the state agency, the federal district court, the county), the process (what a first meeting covers, how long these cases usually run), the money (contingency, hourly, flat fee, and for which stages). Every page speaks to the questions its clients ask. A general firm has the same vocabulary spread thin across twelve practice areas, one paragraph each.
A general firm does not have to become a boutique to state its work this way. It has to write each practice area as if it were the only one: a page per matter type in the matter's own words, with the courts and counties, the fee structure for that matter and the people who do the work. What cannot work is one page that lists twelve areas as bullet points. It contains the words but not the sentences, and an assistant quotes sentences. Place works the same way: "serving the greater metro area" names nothing, while "we appear in Maricopa County Superior Court and the federal court in Phoenix" names two things a question can be answered with.
What the firm's site has to state
Each row is a client's question, the fact about the firm that answers it, and where the fact belongs. The middle column is facts about the firm, not advice about the matter and not predictions about its outcome. Your bar's advertising rules apply to every sentence; nothing here asks for one they would not allow.
| The client asks | What your site states | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| Do you handle this kind of matter? | The practice area by its plain name, and the matter types inside it, each named: wrongful termination, unpaid wages, severance review. | A page per practice area; a Service node per area in the markup |
| In my county? In this court? | The counties and the courts, state and federal, where the firm's attorneys appear, named as facts. | Each practice area page and the contact page; areaServed in the markup |
| Is the first consultation free? | Yes or no, how long it is, whether it is by phone, video or in person, and what to bring. | The contact page and every practice area page |
| How do you charge? | The fee structure for that matter (contingency, hourly, flat fee, retainer) and for which stages, in words. A number only if you publish one and keep it current. | Each practice area page |
| Who would handle my case? | The attorneys by name, bar admissions and courts admitted to, year admitted, languages, and the matters each takes. | The attorney pages; a Person node per attorney |
| Are you a real, current firm? | One firm name, one office address, one main number, hours, identical on every page and in every directory you control. | The footer of every page; name, address and telephone in the markup |
The markup for a firm is LegalService, in schema.org's LocalBusiness tree (the narrower Attorney type is marked deprecated there), carrying the address, telephone and opening hours that Google's local business documentation lists, plus areaServed for the counties. Each practice area is a Service node with its serviceType in the matter's plain name. Each attorney is a Person node whose sameAs points at the state bar's public listing for that lawyer, the one page on the web that settles who they are. All of it as JSON-LD, and all of it repeating what the visible page says.
Stating a practice area without advising or promising
The site describes the firm; it does not decide the reader's case. "We represent employees in wrongful termination claims before the state civil rights agency and in federal court" is a fact about the firm. "You have a strong case if you were fired after reporting harassment" is advice to a stranger.
Results are the harder discipline. A page that says "we win" or lists settlement figures is making a claim about the future to a reader whose facts you do not know, and most bars have rules about exactly that. A page that states what the firm does, in which forum, for whom and how it charges makes no promise and gives an answer the firm's side of every fact the question turns on. Reviews from former clients, quoted with permission and attributed, are the evidence for quality; they are someone else's words, which is why they count.
Credentials are facts and belong on the page as facts: bar admissions by state, courts admitted to, the year, and any certification by the certifying body's name where your state has them. Not "experienced", not "aggressive", not "top-rated". A named lawyer with stated admissions can be named for "licensed in Arizona". An adjective cannot.
What our crawl found on firm-sized sites
61.5% of the 9,483 sites had no question-and-answer content of any kind: no FAQ, no FAQPage markup, nothing shaped like the thing a client asks. The questions a prospective client asks on the first call (what does the first meeting cost, how do you charge, how long does this take, which court) are the ones the site should answer as headings with the answer under each. That is what gives a page citability.
43.1% were inconsistent about who and where they are across their own three main pages, and 36.9% published more than one phone number. Firms with several offices, a main line, an intake line and each partner's direct line get there without trying, and a machine reading the three pages cannot be sure they describe one entity. Label the numbers, pick one as the firm's main number, and put that one in the markup.
17.8% carried no schema.org markup at all, and most of the rest described the website rather than the business. A legal site built on a template can carry WebPage and BreadcrumbList markup and nothing that says the page is about a law firm in a particular county that handles a particular matter. That is the gap the LegalService, Service and Person nodes above close.
What to fix first, in order
- Settle the identity: one firm name, one address per office, one main number, identical on every page, in every bar and directory listing you control, and in the markup. Label the intake and direct lines.
- Write one page per practice area in the matter's own words: the matter types, the courts and counties, the fee structure for that matter, whether the first meeting is free, the attorneys who take it. Each client question as a heading, the answer under it. This is the answer page for that matter.
- Give each attorney a page that states admissions, courts, year admitted, languages and the matters they take, as facts, and link the state bar's public listing.
- Add the markup as JSON-LD: a LegalService node for the firm with address, telephone, opening hours and areaServed; a Service node per practice area; a Person node per attorney. Google's introduction to structured data says the markup describes what a visitor can see, so this follows the pages.
- Put client reviews on the page as text, with permission and attribution, and a rating count from where clients left it. Choose reviews that state facts: how the firm communicated, what the fee arrangement was like, which kind of matter it was.
- Check what a crawler receives: open a practice area page with scripts off, confirm the text is in the HTML, and run the crawler access check. 7.2% of the sites in our audit served a challenge page instead of the site.
What not to do
Do not write reviews of your own firm, and do not copy a platform's star rating into your markup. Google's review snippet documentation rules out fake reviews and ratings gathered from other websites, and many bars' rules on testimonials are stricter still.
Do not stuff the page with matter and place names. "Phoenix employment lawyer, employment attorney Phoenix, Phoenix wrongful termination lawyer" is a string of phrases, not a sentence about the firm, and a string of phrases is not something an answer can quote as a fact about it. Google does not read the keywords meta tag either, as its list of supported meta tags shows.
Do not promise outcomes, and do not accept a promise of placement. No agency has a lever inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity, this one included. What can be done is to measure how often the firm is named on a fixed panel of client questions for its matters and its counties, and to fix what the measurement shows. How we measure it is written down in full.
Common questions
We practice in six areas. Do we have to drop five to be named?
No. You have to write each of the six as if it were the only one: its own page, its own vocabulary, its own courts and fee structure, its own attorneys. The firm that suffers is the one with a single page listing six areas as bullet points, because that page contains the words but not the sentences. Six full pages answer six kinds of question.
Can we state our fees without a number?
Yes, and for most matters you should. State the structure: contingency and the stages it applies to, hourly with the billing increment, flat fee for defined matters, what a retainer covers. That answers "how do they charge", which is the question people ask. A number belongs on the page only if it is true for the matter described and you will keep it current.
Do reviews matter for a law firm, given the confidentiality of the work?
They do, and they can be written without disclosing anything. A former client saying the firm returned calls the same day and explained the fee arrangement plainly is evidence of the things a prospective client asks about, with no facts of the case in it. Quote with permission, attribute by first name and matter type, and keep the rating count sourced from where clients left it.
We are listed in every legal directory. Is that not enough?
The directories carry some facts in their own fields and their own words, the same fields for every firm. They do not carry your matter types in your sentences, your courts, your fee structure or your first-meeting terms. When Claude answered our one-question probe, the names it gave were businesses far more often than directories, which means the assistant is reading your page. Give it something to read.
Sources
The percentages are this site's own, from the audit named below; the sample was drawn per metro and trade across 40 trades, no law-firm-only cut is published, and the naming figure is from one assistant on one day. Nothing on this page is legal advice; it concerns what a firm states about itself. What is said about schema.org types and Google's rules comes from the documents linked where each is used.
Sources: our audit of 9,483 small-business sites, with its method · schema.org, LocalBusiness and its subtypes · schema.org, Service · schema.org, Person · schema.org, sameAs · Google, local business structured data · Google, introduction to structured data · Google, review snippet · Google, meta tags it supports
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