Legal is the sector where the standard local search playbook meets the most friction. Ask every client for a review, post about recent wins, show photos of the work: all three run into confidentiality obligations and regulator advertising rules. That does not mean a firm cannot build a strong profile. It means building it in a different order, with someone signing off the wording.
Practice area categories and why the primary one is hard to choose
Google's legal category list is deep: alongside the generic lawyer and law firm entries there are specific categories for personal injury, family law, divorce, criminal defence, employment, immigration, conveyancing, wills and probate, insolvency, and corporate and commercial work.
A full-service high street firm genuinely practises eight of them and you get one primary, which carries the most weight in deciding which queries the listing is eligible for. Pick by acquisition channel, not revenue: which practice area actually wins work through local search?
- Searched locally, converts locally - conveyancing, wills and probate, family, employment. People type these with a town name and ring the first firm that looks competent.
- Searched heavily, brutally competitive - personal injury and immigration. Worth the primary slot only if the firm is committed to competing there.
- Rarely acquired through search - corporate, commercial property, restructuring. That work arrives through referral, so the primary slot would be spent on queries nobody makes.
Everything else goes in as secondary categories. Then map the services beneath them to the language clients use: "divorce", not "matrimonial proceedings"; "will writing", not "testamentary drafting".
Asking for reviews without breaching confidentiality
The structural problem in legal is that a review is a public statement that the reviewer was your client, and in family, criminal, immigration and employment work the fact of instruction is itself sensitive. What a workable review programme looks like:
- Ask about the service, never the matter - communication, clarity on costs, being kept informed, and say plainly that they should not include details of their case.
- Tell them they can post under an initial - Google lets a reviewer set their display name, and most clients do not know it.
- Segment by matter type - conveyancing, wills, probate and commercial clients are usually comfortable being identified. Family and criminal clients frequently are not, and in some proceedings publicity is restricted outright. Give the fee earner a veto on any file.
- Ask at file closure - not mid-matter, and never while a bill is in dispute.
- Never incentivise and never gate - rewarded reviews breach Google's policies, and so does filtering unhappy clients into a private form.
Individual solicitor profiles versus the firm listing
Google supports listings for individual practitioners as well as the organisation. The conditions matter: the individual must be public-facing and directly contactable at that address, must have a distinct primary category, and must not be the sole practitioner. If one solicitor is the whole firm, you get one listing, and it is the firm.
They pay off in reputation search: somebody referred to a named solicitor types that name into Google before ringing, and the listing puts a controlled result in front of them rather than a scraped directory entry.
Where it goes wrong is volume. A twenty-person firm creating listings for every fee earner, trainee and paralegal at one address, all under the same category, all pointing at the switchboard, looks like listing spam because functionally it is. A listing that survives review has its own headshot, its own direct dial, a distinct primary category and a link to that person's page on the firm site. Departures need a process: a live listing showing a competitor's solicitor at your address is worse than none.
Answering a review about a case you cannot discuss
This is the highest-risk task in legal local search. A disappointed client posts one star with details of the matter, and the instinct is to correct the record, which confirms they were a client and puts confidential information into a public thread you cannot delete.
Check whether it is reportable first
Legal attracts reviews from people who were never clients: the opposing party in a family matter, a beneficiary unhappy with a probate outcome. Those are often eligible for removal under Google's conflict of interest policy. Report before you reply.
Neither confirm nor deny the retainer
Do not say you acted for them, and do not say they were never a client unless you are certain it is safe to say.
Do not touch any fact of the matter
Including facts the reviewer published themselves. Their disclosure does not release your obligation.
Point to the complaints procedure and stop
Acknowledge in general terms, say you cannot discuss individual matters publicly, name the route to raise a concern. Three sentences.
Speed matters less here than accuracy. A considered reply two days later that a partner has read beats a same-day reply that says one sentence too much. Review notifications in a law firm should route to somebody with authority, not to whoever manages the website.
Multi-office and multi-jurisdiction firms
Every staffed office with its own address earns a listing. A mail forwarding address or a meeting room you book twice a month does not, and legal is a sector Google polices for this because of a long history of claims firms manufacturing local offices. For offices that do qualify:
- A distinct local phone number per office - not the group number on all of them
- Office-specific categories - the city office may be commercial and employment while the market town office is conveyancing, family and probate
- Office-specific photography - the real frontage and the people who work there
- Separate review acquisition per office - reviews attach to a location. Two hundred at head office does nothing for a new branch
Firms covering more than one legal system need to go further, because the process a client is buying differs: separate services, separate site pages, separate language.
Once a firm runs six office listings plus practitioner listings, coordination becomes the job. Ampli5 Pulse handles that layer: a multi-location dashboard, AI-assisted review replies drafted for you but held until a person approves them, post scheduling across offices, a media library, performance insights covering calls, directions, clicks and views alongside Search Console, white-label reporting and role-based access. It is not a rank tracker, and it does not make the compliance judgement for you.