1059 of 1323 Law Firm Websites Publish No Price at All

What we measured

Our crawler reads each firm's own website and records which of five kinds of page it can find: a blog or news section, a privacy policy, an index of the attorneys, a disclaimer or terms page, and a page about fees. It finds them two ways, by trying a list of common paths and by reading the firm's own navigation links.

All five are looked for with the same effort on the same pass, which is what makes them comparable to each other. That is the whole design of this study: not whether any one number is high, but which of the five a firm gets to first.

A page we did not find is not the same as a page that does not exist. The record only ever stores a page we found, so every count below is a floor. 65 published firms carry no record of this kind at all and are left out of every figure on this page, rather than counted as publishing nothing. 3 firms in the directory answer our crawler with a refusal, which is their right and not a finding about them.

What is actually there

Here is the order, across 1323 websites.

The ranking is the finding. The thing a law firm website is likeliest to have is the section that brings in search traffic, and the thing it is least likely to have is the one a client would open first.

One thing does predict how much a firm publishes, and it is not the state it sits in. We sorted the directory by how much organic search traffic each firm gets and read every sub-factor against it: the publishing measures all rise with visibility, which is the same finding as this page from the other end. Publishing is what a firm with a marketing budget does. The same is true of the practice pages a firm writes about itself: we counted which kinds of case each injury firm publishes its own page on, and the length of that list tracks the size of the firm rather than anything its clients said.

An attorney index sits in the middle at 835. That page is the input every credential check needs, and we have measured separately what happens when it is missing: the check people assume is routine cannot start.

Very few firms publish the full set.

57 firms publish all five. Cellino Law Injury Attorneys in New York is the highest-scoring of them, and it is worth saying that publishing all five is not what earned that score: it is a few points in one pillar of twenty-five.

The blog and the price

Set the commonest page and the rarest one against each other and the asymmetry is not close.

1066 firms publish a blog and no page about fees, and 5 firms go the other way. Whatever else is true about how law firms build websites, writing comes before pricing by a margin that leaves no room for argument.

The fair objection is that a firm can be perfectly open about money without giving it a page. So we counted that too, from a different field: the firm's own sentence about what it charges, wherever on the site it appears. 172 firms have one.

Those two groups barely overlap. Put together, 264 of 1323 firms say something about price in one form or the other, which leaves 1059 where we found nothing either way. Being generous with the definition moves the number and does not change the answer.

What a firm says is a separate question from whether it says anything, and usually thinner than it looks. We read the fee language of the New York injury firms line by line: the free consultation is nearly universal and therefore differentiates nothing, while the percentage itself, and who carries case expenses if the case is lost, is almost never printed. The consultation half of that is not even a habit of the profession: measured across every practice here, it belongs to the firms paid out of a recovery and to almost nobody else.

Where it differs, and where it does not

Split by state and the blog holds steady nearly everywhere. Massachusetts is the highest at 27 of 28 and Florida the lowest at 159 of 196, which is a narrow band for a practice this scattered.

The fees page moves much more.

Oregon leads at 3 of 20, which is 15%, and Nevada sits last at 2 of 82. Even the state in front leaves most of its firms silent about price, so the variation here is between bad and worse rather than between good and bad.

We have no evidence for why the states differ, and the honest thing is to say so. The obvious suspect is the state's own rules, and one set of them has been tested: we compared the states whose bar rules fix the contingency percentage with the states where it is negotiable, and what firms publish about their fees does not follow the rules. Advertising rules are the other candidate, and nothing in our records reads them. The firms that reach the top of our website sub-score sit in Dallas, Miami, San Diego and San Diego, and they do not all answer to the same rule book.

What our own score does with it

These five pages are most of sub-factor D1, "Website trust and experience", worth 5 points inside the certification score. A fees page and a blog earn a full point each, a privacy policy and a disclaimer half a point each, and passing Google's speed test earns two. The disclaimer page is counted twice over by the engine and in opposite directions: a separate study follows the same sentence onto the case results page, where pillar B takes four points off any firm that does not repeat it there.

Spot the design problem. The blog earns the same weight as the fees page while 89% of the field already has one, so that point separates almost nobody, and the point that would separate firms is the one almost none of them can earn.

D1's first page check reads whether a firm publishes bar registration numbers on its attorney bios, a field that was empty on every record when this page was first written. 1 records carry it now, so the point is live and the paragraph that used to sit here no longer describes the data.

Fixing it is a decision about the scoring engine rather than about any guide, because rescoring the directory moves tiers. The denominator behind every score on this site is the wider version of the same argument: the number is earned points over measured points, and what we failed to measure belongs in that sentence too.

What this cannot tell you

Three things, and the first is the largest.

A page is not the same as an answer. We counted whether a fees page exists, not whether it says anything useful. A page headed "No Fee Unless We Win" is counted here exactly like one printing a percentage and naming who pays costs on a loss, and those are not the same document.

The record cannot say zero. A key is written only when a page is found, so a firm publishing none of the five is indistinguishable in our data from a firm the crawler never reached. That is why 65 firms are excluded rather than scored, and why every column on this page is a floor.

Nothing dates this measurement. Six families of data in this directory carry the date they were read, and a freshness check fails the build when one goes stale. The site crawl behind this entire page is not one of them: the trust-pages record has no date on it and no staleness check over it. The speed measurement next to it in the same pillar carries both. So the single field feeding most of D1 is the one measurement here that nobody can tell the age of, which is a gap in our record-keeping and not in anybody's website.

If you run a firm and your site has more on it than we found, that is worth telling us. Every profile links the source behind each measurement, and a page we missed is a correction we want. The same goes for a firm that would rather we did not guess: the directory shows the evidence behind every sub-score, including the ones marked pending.

Page counts come from our own crawl of each firm's website, which reads the site's own navigation and a fixed list of candidate paths, and follows robots.txt. Score components come from LFL Certified Methodology v2.0.