Protect your bar standing, attract new clients, and control what jurors, judges, and partners find when they search your name.
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100% ConfidentialLaw firm reputation management is the work of controlling what a prospective client, a referring attorney, or opposing counsel finds when they search your firm or your name: search results, directory profiles, client reviews, court records, and the answers AI tools now give when someone asks about you.
A firm does not have one reputation. It has at least three, and they are searched separately. The firm entity is what a corporate client's procurement team looks up. Each named partner is searched individually, usually by a referring attorney deciding whether to send a matter over. And the practice area is where you are compared against every other firm in the county doing the same work. A partner's problem becomes the firm's problem almost immediately, because the partner name and the firm name share a page one. A managing partner whose own name is the problem is an executive reputation management engagement rather than a firm one, and it is usually funded by the firm.
What makes legal different from every other industry we work in is that you are not permitted to defend yourself. Model Rule 1.6 confidentiality does not end when the matter ends. A former client can post an inaccurate account of their own case, and the correction that would settle it is the one response that puts your license at risk. Your state bar's advertising rules then govern what you may claim in public about your own results. Most reputation advice written for businesses ignores both of those constraints, which is why applying it to a law firm is worse than doing nothing.
The cost of leaving it alone is easier to size than most marketing problems, because you already know the inputs. If your firm signs 90 matters a year at an average fee of $12,000, that is $1.08 million in annual fee revenue. One matter a month lost to what a prospect found before calling is roughly $144,000 a year. Run it with your own average fee and your own signed volume. The arithmetic is the point, not our figures.
NetReputation has worked with more than 200 law firms and removed more than 10,000 negative entries for clients since 2014. The legal work runs differently from the rest of our book because the compliance layer sits on top of everything. What we publish on your behalf has to survive your bar's advertising rules, and what we ask of your clients has to survive the rules on soliciting testimonials.
Some of it comes down and some of it does not, and which is which gets decided before any work starts. Four things determine it: who hosts the content, which jurisdiction they sit in, what their own published policy permits, and whether there is a legal basis to argue. A court record published by a government body and a review published by a private platform are different problems with different answers, even when they sit one line apart in the same set of results.
The reason a platform can simply refuse you is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which means a site hosting someone else's post is generally not responsible for it and is under no obligation to take it down because you object. A firm that promises removal by a fixed date is describing a decision it has not yet asked anyone to make. Where a removal path does exist, content removal means the material is deleted at the source. Where none exists, the work becomes content suppression, which means building and ranking accurate material until the damaging result no longer sits where anyone looks. Nothing is deleted in a suppression campaign, and the honest questions are how long the outranking takes and what it costs.
A bar grievance that reaches the legal press, or a verdict that draws news coverage, is a crisis management problem before it is a search problem. The first 48 hours of that shape the next six months of it.
Usually you should not, and the American Bar Association has said so directly. Formal Opinion 496, issued in January 2021, addressed what a lawyer may say when a client criticizes them online. Its conclusion was that a negative review, on its own, is not a controversy between the lawyer and the client under Model Rule 1.6(b)(5), so the self-defense exception most lawyers assume they have does not open. The opinion goes further: even where a genuine controversy exists, a public response is not reasonably necessary. Its stated best practice is that lawyers should give serious consideration to not responding at all.
The opinion leaves three things open to you. You may invite the person to contact you privately. You may say that your professional obligations do not allow you to respond as you would wish. And you may ask the platform or the search engine hosting the post to remove it.
That third option is the one most firms never use, and it is the only one that changes what a prospect actually sees. A removal request made under a platform's own policy is a procedural exercise with rules, evidence requirements and deadlines, and it asks nothing of you that touches the matter.
Reviews from people who were never your clients are common in family law and criminal defense, where the person writing is often on the other side of the case. Opinion 496 permits you to state that the poster is not a client or former client, since you owe them no duty of confidentiality. It also cautions that even a general denial can reveal you were involved, which is why a policy-based removal request is usually the safer route than a public correction.
There are two things firms ask us for that we will not do. We do not write reviews, and we do not screen your clients so that only the satisfied ones get asked. The Federal Trade Commission's Trade Regulation Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials, 16 CFR Part 465, took effect on 21 October 2024 and covers both, including AI-generated reviews and the suppression of genuine ones, with civil penalties per violation. Review gating stopped being a grey area, and for a lawyer it is a second exposure sitting on top of the bar rules.
Whether you may solicit reviews at all is governed by your state rather than by the ABA, and states differ on what you can offer, what disclaimer a testimonial requires, and how a comparative claim has to be qualified. We build the request process to your jurisdiction's rules. NetReputation does not provide legal advice, and your own bar's requirements and your ethics counsel control.
Our review management work for firms covers monitoring across every profile above, a response process that stays inside Rule 1.6, removal requests where a review breaks the platform's own policy, and a compliant way to ask satisfied clients for feedback.
The failure mode is different in each practice area, and so is the response.
Reviews written after a verdict the client blames you for, and coordinated review bombing after a high-profile case.
Reviews from opposing parties who were never your clients, posted while a custody matter is still open.
Fee disputes surfacing publicly, and competitor firms buying visibility against your own name in search.
Law firm branding is the half of this that runs on offense: building and ranking enough accurate, substantive material about your firm that an occasional bad result has nowhere prominent left to sit. Most firms in a given county publish the same practice-area pages and the same attorney bios, so the bar for standing out is lower than it looks from inside.
The loss firms notice last is the one that costs the most. A prospect who searches your name and calls someone else at least leaves a trace in your analytics. Nothing shows up at all when a referring attorney checks you before sending a matter over and then sends it somewhere else, or when a lateral candidate looks you up before returning a recruiter's call. Neither will appear in a form fill, and neither of them will tell you.
The work itself is ordinary and it compounds. Attorney bios that read like a person wrote them. Practice-area pages with real depth rather than 400 words and a contact form. Published commentary in the legal trade press. Speaking and panel coverage. Consistent firm information everywhere your name appears. The same work runs as business branding for our non-legal clients, with one difference here: every asset has to clear your state's advertising rules before it goes up, including how you are permitted to describe results and whether you can call yourself a specialist.
Common questions about legal reputation management.
Because the people deciding whether to hire you, refer to you, or join you all look first, and most of what they find was written by someone else. A firm's search results are assembled from directory profiles, client reviews, court records and news coverage, and the firm controls almost none of it directly. Reputation management is the work of making that result set accurate.
Sometimes, and the outcome turns on who publishes the record, which jurisdiction they sit in, and what their own removal policy permits. Government sources rarely remove anything. Commercial aggregators that republish dockets often will, under their own stated process. Where no removal path exists the work becomes suppression. Across legal engagements our team typically sees first page-one movement in 60 to 90 days, and a firm carrying a large volume of negative material should plan on six to twelve months. Those are observed ranges from our own campaigns, not a commitment to a date.
We build the process to your jurisdiction, and we do not do the two things that get firms into trouble. We never write or buy reviews, and we never screen clients so that only the satisfied ones are asked. Both are covered by the FTC's consumer review rule and by your bar's rules on truthful communications. Your state bar's requirements control, and we are not your ethics counsel.
Directory profiles are usually the largest unclaimed asset a firm has. Most were generated automatically from public records, sit unclaimed, and carry incomplete or wrong information that still ranks. We claim and complete them across Avvo, Martindale-Hubbell, Super Lawyers, Justia, FindLaw and Lawyers.com, correct inaccurate data, and handle policy-based removal requests where a review breaks the platform's own rules.
It depends on how much is ranking and where it is published, so the honest answer is a range rather than a date. Directory and profile work produces visible change fastest. Suppressing an entrenched result takes longest, because it requires building assets that outrank it. Our legal engagements generally show early movement in 60 to 90 days, with fuller campaigns running six to twelve months.
Often, because most platforms require a reviewer to have had an actual business relationship, and a review from an opposing party violates that policy on its face. That is a policy-based removal request and it does not require you to discuss the matter at all. ABA Formal Opinion 496 also permits you to state publicly that the person is not a client, while cautioning that even a denial can reveal your involvement. Where a post crosses into defamation and you are weighing litigation, our SEO expert witness work supports firms on damage assessment and testimony.
It can, and Formal Opinion 496 concluded that a negative review by itself does not open the self-defense exception in Model Rule 1.6(b)(5). The exception lawyers assume they have generally is not available here. The opinion permits inviting private contact, saying that professional obligations limit your response, and asking the host to remove the post. It does not permit discussing the matter itself.
The state bar's own record generally stays, because it is a public record published by the licensing authority and there is no removal path for it. What can usually be addressed are the third-party sites, aggregators and news items that republish it, each under its own policy. Alongside that, suppression work targets what actually appears on page one for your name, which is where the practical damage happens.
It is scoped after an audit rather than quoted from a rate card, because the cost driver is how much material is ranking and how entrenched it is, not the size of the firm. A single directory problem and a decade of negative press are different engagements. We cover what reputation management costs in more detail separately if you want that before speaking to anyone.
The free analysis covers what is currently ranking for your firm name and your partners' names, which of it has a removal path under the host's own policy, and what the rest would take to outrank.
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