A solicitor's website carries a different kind of weight from most small-business websites. It is the credibility check potential clients run before they pick up the phone, the compliance artefact the SRA can audit against the Transparency Rules, and the supplier-due-diligence document larger commercial clients ask for. Getting it right at launch saves a multi-stage retrofit later when a regulatory review or a procurement audit forces the work to be redone under time pressure.
What is different about solicitor websites
Three things make law-firm web design distinct. First, the SRA Transparency Rules require seven specific items (fee transparency for named work types, complaints procedure, regulator details, indemnity summary, accessibility statement, SRA ID and the standards-and-regulations adherence statement) to be published in a clearly findable place — and the rules tighten incrementally every 18 months. Second, the schema layer should carry Person entities for each partner with current practising-certificate dates and qualifications, which Google reads as legal-sector E-E-A-T differently from generic Organization schema. Third, the intake forms have to handle GDPR consent capture, lawful-basis documentation, and a DSAR endpoint to a much higher standard than a typical small-business site, because law firms are held to a higher data-handling bar.
What we ship for a law firm
A multi-page Growth-tier site (£899) with a home page, one landing per practice area (conveyancing, family, probate, immigration, employment — whatever the firm specialises in), a partners-directory with photo bios, a fees-and-complaints page consolidating the SRA-mandated items, a contact page with the multi-step intake form routed into your CRM, and a privacy notice covering the firm's data-handling pipeline. The schema layer carries LegalService with the LawFirm sub-type, Person × N for the partners, Service × N for each practice area with connected Offer entries where fee transparency applies, and AccessibilityStatement linked from the footer.
The SRA Transparency Rules in detail
The seven mandatory items as of the 2024 update: published 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 for each named work type; complaints procedure with a clear Legal Ombudsman escalation path; the SRA Standards and Regulations adherence statement; the firm's SRA ID; and information about consumer redress mechanisms. Each is independently auditable. We build all seven into the launch and document the build choices in the launch email so the audit trail exists from day one.
Person schema for partners — why it matters
A separate Person entity per partner, with `jobTitle`, `qualifications` (typically the LLB and post-admission qualifications), `memberOf` (the relevant law society), and a custom propertyValue carrying the practising-certificate date, gives Google's knowledge graph the kind of structured author information the Helpful Content classifier rewards in regulated sectors. The effect is incremental but consistent — law-firm pages with proper Person schema rank materially better on the named-partner queries that drive direct-instruction traffic.
Pricing
Most law firms land on the Growth tier at £899 — a 7-10 page bespoke build with the full SRA compliance layer, partner directory, practice-area landings and the CRM integration. Pro tier at £1,499 is for larger firms with more than five practice areas, an internal content team that needs editorial tooling, or commercial work that requires a procurement-grade supplier pack. The compliance layer is the same at both tiers; the differentiator is the depth of the content layer and the scale of the partner directory.