When your firm outgrows the photo of the partners on the courthouse steps

Real bio pages for every attorney, practice area pages that do not compete with each other, and a system your office manager can actually run.

There is a point where a firm outgrows the one-page site with a photo of the partners on the courthouse steps. It usually arrives with the third attorney, or with the second distinct kind of matter, and it announces itself in a small way: somebody calls asking for an attorney by name and cannot find her on the site, or a referral partner asks for a link to send a client and there is nothing to send but the home page.

At that size a website stops being a brochure and starts being a filing system. Three things have to be right, and the third one is the one firms of this size most often get wrong, because nobody sold it to them.

One page per attorney, at its own address

Put every attorney on their own page at their own URL. Not an accordion on a team page, not a modal that pops open over a grid of headshots, not a shared "our attorneys" page with five stacked paragraphs.

Four reasons, all practical:

People search names. A referral, a bar directory, a courthouse conversation, a family member who heard a name at work. That search should land on a page that is about that person, not on a team page where the visitor has to hunt for the right paragraph.

Referral partners need something to send. A financial advisor or a therapist forwarding a client wants one link that says "this is who I mean." A page address does that. A tab inside a page does not.

Bios go stale one at a time. New admission, new certification, a change in the matters somebody takes. A page per attorney means the update is a five-minute edit by one person, rather than a request to re-lay out a combined page.

Attorneys leave. When they do, you archive or redirect one page. On a combined page you are performing surgery on a layout under time pressure, which is how firms end up with a former associate's name still on the site nine months later.

A bio page that does its job carries the same things in the same order for every attorney: name and role, a photograph that looks like the person a client will meet, the matters they personally handle, admissions and credentials, education, a short paragraph in an actual human voice, and a direct way to reach that attorney or to request them by name on the firm's intake form. Consistency matters more than flourish here. A visitor comparing two of your attorneys should be comparing the attorneys, not two different page designs.

Practice area pages that do not eat each other

Here is the failure I see most. A firm decides it needs to cover its practice areas, and ends up with pages called "child custody lawyer," "custody and parenting time," "child custody attorney services," and "custody help," all saying roughly the same thing in a slightly different order.

That is a grocery store with four aisles all labeled Dairy. Shoppers wander, nobody can be directed anywhere, and staff spend their day pointing.

The fix is dull and it works. One page per matter type, and each page owns exactly one question a real person would type or ask:

• Divorce: how the process works, what it costs, how long it takes
• Child custody and parenting time: how decisions get made and what a schedule looks like
• Child support: how the number is arrived at and when it can change
• Spousal support: the same, for a different number
• Property and asset division: the house, the pension, the business
• Modifications and enforcement: the matter that comes back two years later
• Uncontested or agreed divorce: a genuinely different buyer, usually the cheapest matter to serve and the most price-sensitive reader

Seven pages, each answering something distinct. If you cannot say in one sentence what question a page answers that no other page answers, it is not a page. It is a section of an existing one.

Two structural habits keep it that way. Every practice area page links to the attorneys who handle that matter, and every attorney bio links back to the practice areas they cover, so the two grids stay connected as staff changes. And every practice area page ends at the same intake form, with a hidden field recording which page the inquiry came from, so after six months you know which matters your site is actually producing.

How many pages the whole thing should come to is a fair question with a real answer: How many pages does a family law firm website actually need?

The part nobody sells you: your office manager has to be able to run it

Most firms of this size do not need a web developer on call. They need one person in the office who can confidently do six things:

1. Update an attorney bio and swap a headshot 2. Change office hours, including a holiday closure 3. Add a new attorney page and remove one who has left 4. Publish an announcement or an article 5. Change a fee, a form, or the disclaimer text on a page 6. Read the intake submissions and know where they went

That is the whole list for most practices, and it is entirely learnable in a single sitting. Grow includes training on exactly those six tasks, with a written one-page reference sheet for the person who actually does them, and login roles set up so your office manager can edit pages without being handed the keys to the hosting account.

A site that requires a support ticket to change a phone number will have a wrong phone number on it within two years. That failure mode is common enough across small-business sites generally that it is worth designing around from day one.

Grow is the size

Grow, $4,500, one time. Up to twelve pages, a real bio page per attorney, separate practice area pages structured so they do not compete, an intake form with source tracking, a place to publish articles, a content management system, and staff training on the six tasks above.

No monthly retainer. Hosting and the domain renew annually and are small.

If you are a solo, Starter at $2,800 is almost certainly the right size. If you are running consultation booking or multiple offices, Complete at $7,500 is the one to look at.

Pricing shown in USD. See Canadian-dollar pricing →

What I will not advise you on

Attorney advertising rules. Whether a bio may describe an attorney as a specialist, whether a result may be described at all, what disclaimer has to appear and where, whether a testimonial is permitted: those vary by state and province and they belong to your bar counsel. I build the pages so that required language has a proper home and can be edited by your own staff the day the guidance changes, and I will happily build to whatever your counsel tells you. I will not be the one telling you.

Start with a conversation

Tell me how many attorneys you have, what matters you want more of, and who in the office is going to be updating the site. If I am not the right fit, I will say so and point you somewhere better. If the site is fine and the listings are the real problem, DivorceSEO's small-firm page covers that instead.

Email hello@divorcewebdesigner.com, or use the contact form.