217 of 1045 Injury Firms Advertise All 7 Types of Personal Injury Case

What we counted

A firm's practice area list is the first thing a client reads and the easiest thing on a law firm website to write. It is also the unit the legal directories are built out of: a taxonomy of areas of law, filled in from what lawyers say about themselves and checked by nobody.

We count something narrower and checkable. A kind of case is recorded against a firm only where the firm publishes its own page about it, with the practice in the page's title or first heading. A link in a footer does not count, because a footer link list tends to carry every area of law that exists. A blog post does not count either. The page we read is stored with the record, so every one of these claims is a URL somebody can open.

The 7 kinds of case are the ones the directory asks every injury firm about:

The limit of this, stated before anything is built on it. 68 of the 1,113 injury firms in the directory carry no area page at all, and that is not a finding about those firms. A site that did not answer our crawler has nothing written against it, and a committed record cannot tell "publishes none of them" apart from "did not answer". So those 68 are out of the denominator rather than counted as zero. Everything below runs on the 1,045 firms that answered and publish at least one, which pushes the measured breadth up rather than down.

What the lists look like

They are long. 217 firms publish a page on every one of the 7, and 53 publish exactly one.

And they repeat. With 7 areas there are 127 lists a firm could publish. Only 87 of them occur here at all, and 4 of those cover 534 of the 1,045 firms. A client comparing two injury firms in the same city is, more often than not, comparing two copies of the same menu.

That is worth saying plainly, because the practice area list is doing a job it cannot do. It is written to signal range, and in a market where almost everybody signals the same range it carries no information at all.

What a long list predicts

Something, as it turns out, and not the thing it is written to suggest. We split the firms at either end of the distribution: 225 publishing 3 kinds of case or fewer, 370 publishing 6 or more. The median firm publishes 5, so the middle band belongs to neither group.

A firm publishing the long list is a larger firm with a larger marketing operation. The median jumps from 1 attorney to 7, and from 67 monthly search visits to 1,237.5. That is not a surprise: a page per practice area is how an injury firm wins the searches that matter, and we have measured before what search visibility tracks and what it does not.

The obvious objection is that this is just firm size, so we held size still. Inside every band of attorney count the gap survives:

We held the market still too. In the 11 markets holding at least eight firms on each side, the long lists carry the higher median score in 11 of them, so this is not a fact about which cities we happen to have opened.

What it does not predict

This is the test the headline rests on, so it is the one we tried hardest to fail. If a longer list meant a firm that handles more kinds of case competently, the people who hired it should say so.

They do not. Mean Google rating is 4.88 for the short lists and 4.85 for the long ones, a difference of 0.03 of a star across 595 firms. A rating also moves with how many reviews sit behind it, so we ran the comparison inside bands of review volume as well:

Count the bands where the long lists carry the higher mean rating: 0 of 3. Whatever a longer practice area list is evidence of, it is not evidence that clients came away happier, and it is the same shape this directory has found before: the things a firm publishes about itself move together, and the things its clients said sit apart from all of them.

The individual firms make the point faster than the averages do. The highest-scoring firm here publishing all 7 kinds of case is Samer Habbas & Associates, at 78, in San Diego. The highest-scoring firm publishing exactly one is Guy Levy Law, at 70, which publishes car accidents in San Diego and nothing else. That is above the median of 60 for the whole long-list group.

What our own score does with it

The certification score awards no points for the length of a practice area list. There is no sub-factor for it, and adding one would be a mistake. Yet the long-list firms score 18 median points higher, which means the list is tracking things the score does measure.

Here is where that gap sits, in raw pillar points on both sides, which is the same unit on each:

Pillar B, what a firm publishes about its own outcomes, is 4.22 of those points. Pillar C, which reads Google ratings, review volume and complaints, is 0.54, or 5% of the gap. Almost everything separating the two groups is a count of how much a firm publishes, and the practice area list is one more count of the same thing. That is a real limit of this scale and we would rather say it here than have somebody else find it.

There is a second fault, and this one is ours alone. Pillar B pays up to three points for how many kinds of case a firm names beside a published result, read with a fixed vocabulary in our own crawler. That vocabulary has no entry for motorcycle accidents or nursing home abuse. 782 firms here publish a page on at least one of those, and not one of them can ever have a result recorded as that kind of case, because our reader has no word for it. It costs almost nothing in points, and we checked rather than assuming: that sub-factor pays for the first 3 kinds of case and no more, and 534 of the 555 firms here with a results page we could read are already at that cap on other categories. It still means the evidence line on those profiles describes a firm's work less well than the firm's own site does. The fix is in the crawler, not in the firms.

The full methodology sets out every sub-factor, the evidence behind it, and the coverage arithmetic that sits under every total on this page: a firm's score is a share of what we could assess about it, not of a flat hundred.

How to use the list instead

The practice area list is not useless. It is a filter, not a ranking: it tells you whether a firm will take your call about this kind of case, and that is all it was ever able to tell you. Read it that way and then stop.

What separates two firms that both advertise your kind of case is what each one publishes that can be checked. Whether there is a case results page at all, and whether the notice that belongs beside a published figure is on it, is a count we have run across the whole directory. What else a firm's website does and does not publish is in the survey of five page types. What a state lets anybody verify about a lawyer at all, which is a shorter list than most people expect, is counted state by state.

Every one of those is on the firm's profile, with the page we read it from. The city rankings put them in order: the personal injury hub carries the highest-scoring firms across every market we have measured, and each market's own page ranks the firms there by the same evidence.

If you run one of these firms and the list we read is wrong, the page we used is on your profile and the firm panel is where to correct it. A practice page we could not reach is a measurement of our crawler, and we would rather fix it than publish it.

Practice areas are read from each firm's own pages by scripts/check_practice.py, which honours robots.txt and records a refusal as a refusal. Google ratings and review counts come from the Places API, search figures from Ahrefs. A firm whose site did not answer is left out of a count rather than scored zero in it.