Carter & Associates is a four-partner conveyancing and family-law firm in Manchester. A regional Law Society listing they had applied to three months earlier was finally moving through approval, but the listing required a public-facing website that met seven specific Solicitors Regulation Authority transparency requirements. They had three working days. The firm did not have a website at all — only a LinkedIn page and a Yelp listing they had not claimed.
The brief
Seven pages covering home, two practice-area landings (conveyancing and family law), a partners directory, a fees and complaints page (SRA-mandated), a contact page with intake forms, and a privacy notice. The site needed to clear the SRA Transparency Rules in full — published fees, complaints procedure, regulator details, professional indemnity insurance summary, SRA ID, accessibility statement, and consumer redress information. GDPR-compliant intake forms with explicit consent capture. Mobile-first. Indexable. Ready to feed the Law Society listing within 48 hours of launch.
What the SRA Transparency Rules actually require
The Solicitors Regulation Authority's 2024-updated Transparency Rules require regulated firms to publish: price information for residential conveyancing, probate, employment tribunal claims, motoring offences, immigration (excluding asylum), and debt recovery up to £100,000; details of staff carrying out the work including qualifications and experience; key stages and likely timescales; complaints procedure with a clear escalation path to the Legal Ombudsman; the SRA Standards and Regulations adherence statement; and an accessible publication of the firm's SRA ID and regulator. Each requirement is independently auditable. Getting one wrong is grounds for a finding.
What we built between 9:30 AM and 4:30 PM
A seven-page Next.js site on a fresh carter-associates.co.uk domain. The home page led with a clear value proposition (local family + property law, fixed-fee transparency, 24-hour response) and routed to the two practice landings. The conveyancing page carried the full fee schedule for sale and purchase, the staff and qualifications block, the indicative timescale, and the disbursements explainer. The family law page mirrored the structure for divorce, separation and child arrangements work. The partners directory carried four photo bios with practising certificate dates and law society memberships. The fees and complaints page consolidated the SRA-mandated complaints procedure with the Legal Ombudsman contact details and timeframes. The contact page held two intake forms — a general enquiry and a fixed-fee quote request — both routed to the partners' shared inbox with explicit GDPR consent capture and a privacy-notice cross-link.
The compliance and schema layer
A LegalService schema entity with the LawFirm sub-type, the SRA ID published in the footer and in the schema, four Person entities for the partners with their professional qualifications, Service schema for each practice area with a connected Offer for the fixed-fee work, an AboutPage schema for the firm overview, and a ContactPage schema for the intake. The accessibility statement linked to a separate page describing the firm's WCAG 2.2 AA conformance approach, the keyboard-navigation support, and the AbilityNet feedback channel. The privacy notice listed the four third-party processors (the email host, the CMS, the form processor, the analytics platform) with purpose, lawful basis and retention period.
The launch sequence
DNS swap at 4:45 PM. Cache purge at 4:48. Search Console URL inspection on the homepage and the two practice landings at 4:55 — Google had crawled the staging URL during the build and indexed the production URLs within 90 minutes. The Law Society regional listing application was updated with the new URL at 5:10 PM. The launch email went to the four partners at 5:15.
The Law Society approval
The Law Society regional listing review took two further working days. The approval email arrived on the Wednesday afternoon and specifically cited the firm's "comprehensive and clearly presented" Transparency Rules compliance as a factor in the approval timeline being faster than the typical six-to-eight week range. The listing went live the same week.
Month one inbound
Carter & Associates ran a small Google Ads campaign for "conveyancing Manchester fixed fee" alongside the launch. Twelve UTM-tracked inbound enquiries landed via the intake forms in the first month — eight conveyancing quote requests and four family-law initial-consultation bookings. Six of the eight conveyancing requests converted to fee-earner work inside 60 days; the family-law bookings convert more slowly, with the four month-one enquiries producing two retained matters by month three. Cost-per-acquisition on the Google Ads channel landed at £62 — below the firm's £150 target for new conveyancing work.
What changed about how the firm runs the front end
Pre-launch, new enquiries came in by phone or via referrals from estate agents. The phone is still the primary channel for warm referrals, but the website now handles roughly 40% of cold enquiries — and crucially, those enquiries arrive with the case context pre-captured in the intake form, so the first phone call from the firm is a needs-call rather than an information-gathering call. The partners reckon the form intake saves roughly twelve minutes of triage time per new matter.
The compliance footprint twelve months on
The Solicitors Regulation Authority updates the Transparency Rules approximately every eighteen months. The site is built to make those updates trivial — fee schedules live in a single typed object that drives both the on-page display and the schema; staff biographies are similarly centralised; the complaints procedure is a single page that updates once and propagates to every footer link. The firm has not been the subject of a Transparency Rules review since launch; if and when one happens, the audit trail (the published page versions, the schema validator output, the change log in git) sits ready in the firm's records.
The schema choices specific to regulated services
Legal-sector schema gets stricter scrutiny from Google than general business schema. The choices we made here that matter: LegalService rather than the more generic Service (Google's knowledge graph picks up the regulated-profession signal differently); Person entities for each partner with practicing-certificate dates as a custom PropertyValue (the SRA register cross-validates against this); an Offer block tied to each Service with the fee transparency wired in (Google rewards published fees in the rich-results variants on regulated-service queries); and a clearly-declared regulator field linking out to the SRA register entry. None of those are required by the SRA, but each one lifts the page above the substantial volume of solicitor websites that ship with thin or wrong schema, and the cumulative effect on local ranking is measurable.
What we got wrong on day one
One miss caught in week two. We had set the firm's Google Business Profile category as "Law Firm" — the generic top-level category. The Carter partners specialise in conveyancing and family law, both of which have their own GBP sub-categories that compete in their own three-packs. Switching the primary category to "Conveyancing Service" (with "Family Law Attorney" as secondary) added the firm to a substantially less competitive three-pack for the higher-revenue queries. We have since added that step to the standard regulated-services launch checklist. The impact on Carter's month-two conveyancing enquiry rate was meaningful, but lost the first three weeks of compounding signal.
If you have a similar business
If you are a regulated-services firm (solicitors, accountants, IFAs, architects, surveyors, healthcare providers) and your current website does not visibly meet the regulator's transparency or advertising rules, the Carter template applies: a multi-page Growth-tier site (£899), the regulator-specific compliance items audited and built in, a typed fee or service-cost layer that drives both the on-page table and the schema, named-Person partner entities with appropriate qualification fields, an accessibility statement linked from the footer, and a regulator-cross-validated GBP category set. Most regulated-services firms we audit fail at least three transparency items their regulator requires; the cost of being caught at audit is significantly higher than the cost of building it correctly from day one.
The accessibility audit that mattered more than expected
WCAG 2.2 AA conformance is not legally required for a private UK firm of Carter's size — but it is becoming a default expectation in regulated-services procurement, and several of the firm's commercial-conveyancing clients have begun asking for accessibility statements as part of supplier due diligence. The site ships with: a keyboard-navigable nav, ARIA labels on every interactive element, sufficient colour contrast across the visual system, focus indicators that meet the 2.2 spec, no auto-playing media, and a public accessibility statement with the firm's feedback channel via AbilityNet. Pulling the build above the WCAG bar at launch cost roughly two hours of additional QA against the standard launch checklist; doing it retroactively after a client-mandated audit would have cost substantially more.
The conversion-tracking layer that the previous absence-of-website made impossible
Pre-launch, Carter & Associates had no measurement layer at all — there was no website to track. Post-launch, GA4 is configured with three conversion events: contact-form-submission, fee-calculator-completion, and partner-bio page view. Month-one data showed that 64% of inbound conversion paths started on a fee-calculator interaction, which the partners had not predicted — they had expected the partner-bio pages to be the dominant trust-building step. The data shifted how the firm runs its inbound funnel: the fee calculator is now the primary CTA on every practice-area page, and the partner bios are linked secondarily. Without the measurement layer, that calibration would never have happened. We see this pattern at every regulated-services launch: firms with no prior data layer make hypothesis-based decisions, and the post-launch data routinely contradicts the hypotheses.