Law Firm Web Design In New York

New York regulates attorney advertising more prescriptively than most states, and several of those rules land directly on the website build rather than on the copy. 

Rule 7.1(f) requires that an advertisement be labeled “Attorney Advertising” — on the first page, or in the case of a website, on the home page. Not the footer of a privacy policy. The home page. 

Rules 7.1(d) and (e) require the disclaimer “Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome” wherever the site makes claims about past results, comparisons to other lawyers, or the quality of services. For a firm that leads with verdicts and settlements — most New York injury firms do — that disclaimer needs to be a designed, systematic part of the results component, not a line someone remembers to paste. 

Rule 7.1(k) requires that a copy of computer-accessed communications be retained for not less than one year, and that a website’s contents be preserved on initial publication, on any major redesign, and after any significant content change — at intervals of no less than every 90 days. 

That last one is a build requirement, and almost nobody designs for it. It means your CMS needs a deliberate archiving strategy: scheduled snapshots, retained and retrievable, surviving a theme change or a migration. If your site is on a platform where content history is thin and your agency has never mentioned this, you are almost certainly not meeting it. 

Rule 7.4 restricts claiming to be a “specialist.” Outside patent and admiralty practice, the claim generally requires certification by an ABA-accredited body, with a disclaimer noting the certification isn’t granted by a governmental authority and isn’t required to practice law in New York. This shapes navigation labels, page titles and H1s across the whole practice area section. 

Rule 7.5 governs firm names and domains. A domain that doesn’t contain the firm name is permitted only under conditions — including that it not imply an ability to obtain results. Names promising settlements or outcomes are the classic failure. 

Rule 7.1(c) and (e) govern testimonials: paid endorsements must be disclosed, and a testimonial concerning a pending matter requires the client’s informed consent, confirmed in writing. 
None of this is exotic. It’s just rarely handled at design stage, which is where it’s cheap to handle. Building a results module without the disclaimer designed into it, or a testimonial component with no field to flag consent status, means every future content update is a compliance risk carried by whoever happens to be editing the page. 

We design these as components with the rules built in — so compliance is a property of the system rather than a task someone has to remember. 

The substantive law here is different enough that a practice area structure imported from another state will miss what New York clients are actually searching for. 

Labor Law §240 and §241 — the Scaffold Law — impose a standard of liability on owners and contractors in gravity-related construction accidents that has no real equivalent elsewhere in the country. For a New York construction injury practice, this isn’t a subsection of a personal injury page. It’s a content cluster of its own, because it’s the specific thing that makes a New York case winnable and the specific thing an injured worker’s family starts searching after an accident. 

No-fault and the serious injury threshold — New York’s no-fault system under Insurance Law Article 51, and the §5102(d) threshold that determines whether a car accident claimant can sue at all, generate a whole layer of questions that don’t exist in tort states. What counts as a serious injury. What the 30-day filing window means. Why a claim was denied. Each is a real search, and most New York firm websites answer none of them. 

The 90-day notice of claim — under General Municipal Law §50-e, claims against the City, the MTA, NYC Health + Hospitals and other public entities require notice within 90 days. A significant share of New York accidents involve a municipal defendant. A site that doesn’t surface this prominently is failing the visitor at the exact moment the clock is running. 

Housing Court and the HSTPA — landlord-tenant practice in New York operates in a system, and under a statutory regime, that simply doesn’t exist in most jurisdictions. 

We plan practice area architecture around what’s distinct about New York cases, because that’s where the search volume with real intent actually sits — and where the large national legal content farms have nothing useful to say. 

New York is the deepest legal advertising market in the country. The firms above you on the results page have budgets you likely can’t match, and outspending them isn’t the strategy. 

What works is precision. Borough and neighborhood-level relevance rather than one “New York” page. Attorney profiles with genuine substance — bar admissions, reported decisions, languages spoken, correct Attorney schema — because New York clients research the individual lawyer, not just the firm. Practice area pages built on New York statutes rather than generic explainers. And an intake path that works on a phone, one-handed, from a hospital waiting room, because that’s where a meaningful share of these inquiries originate. 

Immigration, personal injury, matrimonial, mass tort and legal technology. We understand the ethical constraints each practice works under.

Rules 7.1 to 7.5 handled at the design stage, where it’s cheap, rather than in a pre-launch scramble.

One team from strategy to post-launch. No gaps where a compliance decision gets dropped between vendors.

We report on qualified enquiries and signed matters. Not impressions.