Link building for lawyers, and nothing publishes under your name until you have read it
Your byline goes on an article a marketing agency drafted. Nobody ranking for this term wants to discuss that part. So: we publish the list of things we refuse to write, your named reviewer signs off in writing before anything goes live, and we invoice when it does. Not a day before.
You are the author of record. So you are the one who signs it off.
Six things we will not write for a law firm
This is our house standard for regulated verticals. It describes our own output and nothing else, because we are not qualified to tell you what your licensing authority requires. It is published in full as a writer brief you can download and hand to any other agency. It costs us placements. That is the only reason it is worth reading.
No superlatives or comparative claims
No “best”, no “top-rated”, no “number one”, no “leading”. Not in the body, not in the headline, not in the anchor text. Nowhere at all. This one removes more publisher slots than the other five together, because superlatives are what most editors expect a marketing brief to supply.
No guarantees or predictions of outcome
Nothing that promises or implies a result, a settlement figure or a verdict. Not in the copy, not in the anchor, not in the meta description we suggest to the publisher. Publishers sometimes add one themselves. When that happens we flag it before it runs.
No past results without the context you supply
We do not reach for a prior outcome to make a paragraph land. Where a result appears, the framing and any context around it come from you, verbatim. We do not paraphrase. And we do not decide which of your results are safe to mention in the first place.
No specialisation or expert language absent certification
“Specialist”, “expert” and “certified” appear only where you have supplied the certification that supports them. Several jurisdictions restrict those words specifically. We do not decide which. We simply do not write them unless you have given us the basis.
No testimonial or endorsement copy
We do not write client endorsements, we do not solicit them on your behalf, and we do not place them in third-party content. Testimonial rules vary more than most agencies realise. Instead of tracking that, we stay out of the category entirely.
We insert your disclaimers, we do not decide when one is needed
Any disclaimer you supply goes in verbatim, exactly as written. We then confirm with the publisher that it survived their editing before we call the placement done. Whether a disclaimer is required in a given jurisdiction is a call for your counsel. We have no view.
You are the author of record. So you sign it off.
Here is the thing this category does not say out loud. When an agency places an attorney-attributed article, your name goes on words somebody in marketing wrote. Of the ten pages ranking for this term that we could read, not one says who approves those words before they publish.
We do, and the answer is you.
Written sign-off, every time. Nothing goes live without your named reviewer approving the draft in writing. Not a courtesy we extend when asked. A gate that stops the work.
Your review time is the schedule. A partner reviewing drafts is spending your most expensive and least billable hour, and publishers do not hold slots while it happens. Expect roughly twenty to forty minutes per placement on your side. We will not compress that, we will not chase you into approving something quickly, and we will not backdate a calendar to hide the delay. If your firm cannot commit that time, say so at the start and we will tell you this is the wrong service for you.
The removal SLA
If your reviewer flags something on a live placement, we pursue amendment or removal with the publisher within five working days and report back what happened, including when the answer is no. Asking a publisher to alter a published post burns the relationship we spend on your other placements, which is precisely why so few agencies will put a window on it.
Content that stops being true
A verdict gets reversed on appeal. A result stops being current. The partner whose byline sits on a two-year-old article leaves the firm, and a publisher is still holding them out as yours. We re-check placements annually, flag anything carrying a name or a claim that has moved, and run it through the same removal process.
We do not promise your content is compliant, and you should be suspicious of anybody who does
Advertising rules bind you. They do not bind us. A state bar cannot discipline a marketing agency, so a vendor promising “bar-compliant content” is transferring exactly nothing.
It is worse than nothing. You are responsible for the conduct of the non-lawyer vendors you retain. A vendor holding itself out as the compliance authority does not reduce your obligation. It enlarges the record you would have to produce showing you supervised a vendor that was claiming to be in charge.
So when this goes wrong, and occasionally it does, the firm answers to the bar and the agency answers to nobody. Which is why we will not use the phrase, will not put it in a heading, and will not let a salesperson say it on a call.
What we do instead is the only thing a marketing vendor can honestly do. We write to a published standard, we hand you every draft, you decide, and we do not publish until you have. Your counsel is the compliance authority for your firm. We are a supplier with a very specific list of things we refuse to write.
This describes our content practice. It is not legal advice.
What we write, what we refuse to write, which publisher runs it, and whether your disclaimer survived their editing.
Whether a given placement is permissible for your firm in your jurisdiction, and whether a disclaimer is required at all.
A promise of compliance from a party the bar cannot discipline moves no risk. It only adds to the supervision you would have to evidence.
Flat fees for marketing work. Never per lead, never per case.
How a vendor is paid is itself a rules question, and it is the one most marketing agencies walk into without noticing.
We do not charge per lead. We do not charge per signed case. We do not take a percentage of anything, and we will not structure a fee that moves with the outcome of your matters. If you ask us for performance-based pricing, and firms do ask, the answer is no.
We are aware that costs us business. Per-lead pricing is what a lot of firms want, and there are vendors who will happily write it into a contract.
The reason is straightforward. Fee arrangements that share revenue with non-lawyers or attach payment to a recommendation sit in territory your rules constrain. We are not going to be the reason a firm has to explain its marketing invoice, so we removed the question by removing the option.
One firm per practice area per metro
This is the question a managing partner asks first and no page on this SERP answers.
The conflict is not theoretical, it is mechanical. There are perhaps forty publishers worth placing on for a given practice area in a given city. Sign two personal injury firms in the same metro and the second one is buying whatever the first one did not take, at the same price, on the same list. Every agency that will not answer this question is doing that to somebody right now.
So we do not. One firm per practice area per metro, written into the engagement, for as long as you are a client.
No market is spoken for yet. When one is, it is listed here with the metro and the practice area, so you can check your own city before you contact us.
If your city and practice area are already taken by the time you read this, we will say so on the first call and tell you who else we would recommend.
Why the generic package does not survive contact with a law firm
Three things separate this from a general campaign, and only one of them is the compliance layer.
It is local, and that inverts most link building advice
Authority has to land in the market you serve. For a firm in one metro, a placement on a regional title with genuine readership in that city does more than a national one with four times the domain rating. Most link building is sold on the opposite assumption.
It sits in a category search engines scrutinise harder
Legal content is held to a higher evidentiary standard, so thin publishers and weak sources underperform far more sharply here than in software or retail. The floor is higher and the middle of the market is worthless.
The money attracts schemes
Legal clicks run into the tens of dollars on paid search, and that money has produced an ecosystem of networks and scholarship farms aimed squarely at law firms. It means your competitors’ link profiles are a dangerous template. Matching them link for link can import their problems.
Not all practice areas cost the same, and nobody tells you which
Three of the ten pages we read segment practice areas. All three do it as a coverage list. None ranks them, which means a family lawyer and a mass tort firm read the same page and get the same implied price. The ranking below is built from public keyword and SERP data, sourced and dated, so you can rebuild it yourself.
| Practice area | Contestedness | What that means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Personal injury | Most contested | Highest cost per placement and longest ramp. The segment where market exclusivity matters most |
| Mass tort and class action | Most contested | As above, plus a publisher pool that shrinks further because many titles decline the category |
| Medical malpractice | Highly contested | YMYL scrutiny at its sharpest, and the standard of publisher required is the highest on this list |
| Criminal defense | Local, contested | Local wins are achievable. National placements do comparatively little |
| Immigration | National and local | Unusual in splitting both ways, which changes the placement mix |
| Employment | Mixed | Depends heavily on whether you act for employers or employees |
| Intellectual property | National | Trade and technology press are genuinely reachable here |
| Corporate and business | National | Business press, and the least local of anything on this list |
| Family law | Local, winnable | Materially cheaper than PI. Most firms in this category are overpaying for a PI-shaped plan |
| Estate planning | Local, winnable | Small and local, and the best value on this list |
| Bankruptcy | Local, winnable | Local and seasonal, and rarely competitive at the publisher level |
We re-run this twice a year. If you are in one of the winnable categories, the honest advice is that you need less of this than a PI firm does, and we would sooner say so now than after you have signed something.
The constraint is not the rules. It is who will publish you.
The practical limit on a legal campaign is not what your bar permits. It is how many editors will run attorney-attributed content at all, and that is a supply question we can actually answer.
Regional news and city titles
The best source of local authority and the hardest to get. Editorial standards are real, the process is slow, and a genuine local story beats a pitch every time.
Legal trade and practice publications
Receptive to attorney bylines by definition, and the pool is small enough that we will tell you when we have exhausted it for your practice area. Attorney commentary sourced through digital PR reaches the rest.
Business and industry press
Good for corporate, IP and employment work. Largely closed to personal injury.
General interest and lifestyle titles
Where most cheap legal placements come from, and where most of them are worth nothing. We use these sparingly, through vetted guest posting, and we say when we have.
Categories that decline attorney content on liability grounds exist in every market. We name them in your target list with the reason.
What we will not place in, and what we will not bill you for
Five of the ten pages we read cover legal directories. All five treat them as opportunities. Not one names a directory as not worth the money, and one of them raises the question in its own FAQ and then answers it without naming anything.
We are not going to tell you which of your directory invoices to cancel, because we do not sell directory listings and free advice that makes us look honest is not worth much to you.
What we will do is state our own position. A directory listing does not count toward a placement deliverable and we will not invoice you for one. If your plan includes directory work, it is billed separately or not at all.
Organic traffic to the specific profile page, not to the directory’s homepage.
Whether the directory ranks for the queries your clients actually use.
Whether entry is editorial, or open to anybody paying.
Whether the profile is indexed at all.
Apply those to whatever is on your desk. You will not need us to tell you the answer.
Two tactics we refuse, one of which is being recommended to you on this same page of results
Legal is the vertical where link schemes are most aggressively sold, because it is the vertical where the money is. Two in particular are worth naming.
Scholarship links
A scholarship page, an application form, then an outreach campaign to university resource pages. It is cheap, it produces .edu links quickly, and it is still being recommended by pages ranking on the first page of results for this exact term. The mechanism is the problem: every firm running it produces the same page shape on the same lists of university resource pages, so the footprint is identical and visible to anyone who looks. Search one and you will find hundreds. We do not sell it.
Private blog networks
Sites that exist to host links. Three of the ten pages we read already disavow these, so we are not claiming credit for it. Worth stating only because the legal vertical has more of them than any other and because a competitor profile full of them is not a template to copy. We will point out which of a competitor’s links look like this if you ask, and we will not build them.
How it runs
| Stage | What we do | What you do | What arrives |
|---|---|---|---|
| Audit | Review your existing profile for scheme and network exposure. Map local competitors for where their authority actually comes from | Nothing | The findings, yours to keep either way |
| Mapping | Decide which city and practice-area pages need authority, and in what order | Confirm priorities | A target list with the reason per target |
| Vetting | Screen publishers for real traffic in your markets and for network footprints | Nothing | The rejections, with the reason per domain |
| Drafting | Write to the published standard, against each publisher’s guidelines | Approve in writing. Roughly 20 to 40 minutes per placement | The draft, before it goes anywhere |
| Placement | Publish, verify, index-check | Nothing | Live URL, market served, page it points at, date |
Priced by how contested your market is
Legal is priced on the same per-link rates as everything else we sell. What changes is the mix. Every draft goes through the standard above and then through your review, local relevance narrows the publisher pool sharply, and a category held to a higher evidentiary standard rules out the cheap middle of the market entirely — so a legal programme sits in the higher bands.
There is no niche surcharge. Retainers are built from our published per-link rates — DR 40+ at $200, DR 50+ at $300, DR 60+ at $450, DR 70+ at $550 — the same rates as guest posting and blogger outreach. $1,500 is six placements (3 × DR 40+, 3 × DR 50+). $4,000 is twelve (2 × DR 40+, 6 × DR 50+, 4 × DR 60+). $10,000 is twenty-five (11 × DR 50+, 10 × DR 60+, 4 × DR 70+).
Two of the ten pages we read publish any price. One anchors the market at $7,000 a month. We would rather be specific than cheapest.
Flat fees. Never per lead, never per case, never a share of anything. We invoice on live placement.
Our floor is $1,500 a month.
Below that we cannot buy enough placements in a contested market to move anything, and taking the money would be taking it for nothing. If your budget is under the floor, the honest answer is local citations, your Google Business Profile and one genuinely good referral relationship, none of which we sell.
What we do not do, and who should not hire us
We build the link layer. That is the whole offer.
We do not do law firm SEO and we do not do SEO for lawyers in the general sense. No technical audits, no Google Business Profile management, no site migrations, no content programmes on your own domain, no local citation cleanup. If your firm has an SEO agency or an in-house lead, we work alongside them and they own everything except the links. If you do not have one, you probably need one before you need us.
Agencies buying on behalf of a firm are a different conversation, and a quieter one. That is the white label link building page.
Your practice area and metro are already taken.
Your budget is under our floor.
Nobody at your firm can commit twenty to forty minutes per placement to review drafts. The approval gate is the product, and a firm that cannot staff it will get a worse version of what everybody else sells.
We have not run a law firm campaign yet
Somebody has to be first. That should be a decision you make with the facts, not one you make because a page was vague.
Our work has been in restricted categories: mainstream publishers decline them outright, and what the content may claim is constrained. What transfers is the mechanism — negotiating with editors who screen by category, writing to a standard somebody else sets, and working markets where most of the publisher pool says no before you start.
What does not transfer: legal publisher relationships, attorney bylines, standing in the legal directories. We are starting those from zero, and a first legal engagement will ramp more slowly than a campaign in a category we already work in. Expect that, and hold us to it.
The writer brief we hand our own writers, yours to hand to any other agency.
Declined domains with the reason attached, per campaign.
A real reviewer comment and the change it produced, plus an instance where the removal SLA was used.
Link building for law firms, answered
Will your content comply with my state bar’s advertising rules?
We will not tell you that it does, because we are not qualified to and because a vendor who does is adding to your supervisory burden instead of reducing it. We write to the standard published above, which is a list of things we refuse to write. You approve every draft. Your counsel decides what is compliant.
Do we approve content before it publishes?
Always, in writing, from a named reviewer. It is a gate, not a courtesy. Budget twenty to forty minutes per placement on your side.
Do you work with my competitors?
Not in your metro and your practice area. One firm per practice area per metro, written into the engagement, held for as long as you are a client. If your market is taken, we will tell you before you get on a call with us.
Will you work on a per-lead or per-case basis?
No. Flat fees for marketing services only, never per lead, never per signed case, never a share of anything. Fee arrangements that share revenue with non-lawyers or attach payment to a recommendation sit in territory your rules constrain, and we would rather lose the work than be the reason you have to explain an invoice.
Do you use scholarship links or PBNs?
No to both. Scholarship schemes produce an identical page shape across the same lists of university resource pages, so the footprint is visible to anyone who searches for it, and pages ranking on this very SERP are still recommending them. We will flag competitor links of that kind instead of suggesting you match them.
What if something publishes that we are unhappy with?
You should not be, because you approved it. If it happens anyway, we pursue amendment or removal within five working days and report what the publisher said, including when the answer is no. Asking a publisher to change a live post costs us the relationship, which is why few agencies will put a window on it.
Are legal directories worth paying for?
Some are and most are not, and we are not the right people to audit your invoices because we do not sell listings. A directory profile does not count toward a placement deliverable here and we will not bill you for one. The criteria we apply are published above. Apply them yourself.
Do you do law firm SEO?
No. We build the link layer only. No technical work, no Google Business Profile, no migrations, no content on your own site. If you have an SEO agency we work alongside them. If you do not, you likely need one before you need us. Agencies buying on behalf of a firm should read the white label link building page instead.
Have you worked with law firms before?
Not yet, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise. Our background is in restricted categories where publishers decline the vertical outright. What transfers is the discipline. What does not is legal publisher relationships, which we are building from zero. A first engagement ramps more slowly.
How long until we see movement?
Local usually moves before national, and the range depends entirely on how contested your practice area and metro are. A personal injury firm in a major metro is a different timeline from an estate planning practice in a smaller one. We give you a specific expectation during the audit instead of a number that would be wrong for half the firms reading this.
Send us your domain, your practice areas and your markets
We come back with where your local competitors are getting their authority, which of their links look like schemes instead of targets, what is already sitting in your own profile, and whether your metro and practice area are still open. Yours to keep whether or not you hire us.
Where your local competitors get their authority
Which of their links are worth matching, and which are liabilities
Scheme and network risk already sitting in your own profile
Whether your metro and practice area are still open