Picture someone with a real legal problem sitting at their kitchen table late on a Tuesday night. They found your firm through a search, clicked through to an attorney bio, and started reading. The bio says the attorney has “over ten years of experience,” which was true when it was written in 2017. It lists a phone extension that now rings at an empty desk. The practice-area page they came from describes a type of case your firm stopped taking two years ago.
Nobody at the firm would ever say any of those things to a prospective client in person. But the website is saying them every day, to everyone who visits.
This is one of the quietest problems a small law firm can have. Outdated bios and practice pages rarely cause a dramatic failure that someone notices and fixes. They just erode trust a little at a time, before a prospect ever picks up the phone, and the firm never finds out about the calls that didn’t happen. Below we walk through what tends to go stale on attorney bios and practice-area pages, why accuracy carries extra weight for legal websites, and a simple rhythm for keeping it all current without turning it into a project.
Why accuracy carries more weight on a law firm website
People rarely hire a lawyer casually. They are usually worried, sometimes scared, and they are reading your site to answer one question: can I trust these people with this? Every detail on an attorney bio is evidence they use to answer it. When one detail turns out to be wrong, such as a phone number that doesn’t work or a credential that has lapsed, the reader has no way to know which other details are also wrong. So they discount all of them.
Search engines are trying to answer a version of the same question. Google’s guidance on creating helpful, reliable, people-first content describes how its systems look for signals of experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, and it says plainly that trust is the most important of the four. The same guidance notes that topics which can significantly affect someone’s financial stability, safety, or well-being get even more weight on those signals. Legal questions fall squarely in that group. Google also encourages clear, accurate information about who created content and warns that false credentials make a page untrustworthy. An attorney bio is, in effect, the “who” behind every practice-area page on your site, so its accuracy matters twice.
Then there are the professional rules. The American Bar Association’s Model Rule 7.1, which most states have adopted in some form, prohibits false or misleading communications about a lawyer or the lawyer’s services, and state bars generally treat a firm website as one of those communications. Many states go further with their own requirements on things like past results, testimonials, specialization language, and disclaimers. The Florida Bar, for example, keeps its advertising rules, a handbook on lawyer advertising, and sample complying and noncomplying ads in one place for its members.
We are a website company, so we won’t tell you what your state requires. That’s a question for your state bar’s rules and, where needed, your own ethics counsel. What we can say from the website side is this: a statement that was accurate when it was published can become inaccurate simply by sitting there. Careful writing at launch helps, but time and staff changes will still catch up with any page that nobody revisits.
What goes stale on attorney bios
Attorney bios tend to be written once, usually during a site launch or when someone joins the firm, and then nobody looks at them again until something forces the issue. Here are the details we see drift most often.
Bar admissions and jurisdictions come first because they matter most. An attorney may have been admitted in a new state, let a license go inactive, or been admitted to practice before a federal court since the bio was written. If the bio lists a state where the attorney is no longer active, a prospect in that state may reasonably assume the firm can help them. If it leaves out a new admission, the firm is hiding a credential it worked hard to earn.
Years of experience are the next quiet problem. Phrases like “over 15 years of practice” or “a decade of courtroom experience” are true on the day they are written and then slowly become wrong in the other direction, understating the attorney’s experience every year after. The simple fix is to write the year the attorney was admitted (“admitted to practice in 2009”) and let the reader do the math. That sentence will still be accurate five years from now.
Certifications, specialization language, awards, and memberships deserve a careful look. Board certifications and specialty designations can expire or require renewal, and many states have specific rules about when a lawyer may describe themselves as a “specialist” or “expert.” Awards and peer-recognition lists usually carry a year for a reason. A badge from 2018 presented without a date reads as current to a visitor, and that is worth checking against your state’s rules on how such honors can be described. Professional memberships and leadership roles change too; if someone chaired a section of the local bar association three years ago, the bio should say so in the past tense.
Case results need the most care of anything on a bio. If an attorney’s page highlights verdicts or settlements, check that each one is described accurately, that the result actually belongs to that attorney or the firm, and that any disclaimer your state requires appears where your state requires it. Disclaimers have a way of getting lost during redesigns, when a results section gets moved into a new layout and the small print underneath doesn’t come along.
Headshots are easy to overlook, but they set expectations. A prospect who meets an attorney in person and finds they look fifteen years older than their photo won’t be upset, exactly, but it plants a small question about what else on the site is out of date. A fresh photo every few years and a consistent style across the whole team goes a long way.
Contact routing is where stale bios cost firms actual clients. Many bios list a direct phone number, an email address, a scheduling link, or a contact form that routes to a specific person. When assistants change, extensions get reassigned, or an attorney moves to a different office, those paths can quietly break. The form still submits. The email still sends. It just lands in an inbox nobody checks anymore, and the prospect assumes the firm didn’t care enough to reply.
When an attorney leaves the firm
Departures deserve their own process, because they create the most confusing kind of stale content. A former attorney’s bio left live on the site misrepresents who is available to take a matter, and it can confuse former clients who are trying to follow their lawyer to a new firm. Practice-area pages often name or link to that attorney as well, and blog posts may carry their byline. When someone leaves, the bio should come down or be handled according to your state’s rules and your departure agreement, any page that names them should be updated, and links pointing to their old bio should be redirected somewhere sensible, such as the attorney directory or the relevant practice-area page, so visitors don’t hit a dead end.
What goes stale on practice-area pages
Practice-area pages drift for a different reason. Bios go stale because people change; practice pages go stale because the firm changes, and the website doesn’t hear about it.
The most common issue is a practice area the firm no longer handles. Maybe the attorney who did immigration work left, or the firm decided to stop taking a certain type of personal injury case. The page stays up because it ranks well or because nobody remembered it was there, and it keeps bringing in inquiries the firm has to turn away. That wastes the prospect’s time and the front desk’s time, and it leaves the person who reached out with a worse impression than if they had never found you.
The reverse happens too. A firm adds a new service line or a new attorney with a different focus, and the website never mentions it. Prospects searching for that help go to a competitor whose site does.
Practice pages also tend to name the attorneys who handle that work. Those names should match the current roster, and the links should point to live bios. If a page says “contact our estate planning team” and the only estate planning attorney left last spring, the page is making a promise the firm can’t keep.
Statements about the law itself can go out of date as well. If a page explains a filing deadline, a dollar threshold for small claims court, or how a particular statute works, those details can change when legislatures and courts act. Pages that describe the law in general terms age better than pages packed with specific numbers, but either way, an attorney who practices in that area should reread the page on a regular schedule and confirm it still reflects current law.
Finally, there are the practical details that live on practice pages: office locations, phone numbers, the counties or cities the firm serves, office hours, statements like “free initial consultation,” and any fee information. If the firm closed a satellite office, stopped offering free consultations, or changed how it handles intake, every page that mentions the old arrangement needs to change along with it. These details are scattered across many pages, which is exactly why they get missed.
Keeping your site and your Google presence in agreement
Your website isn’t the only place prospects see this information. They also see your Google Business Profile, legal directories, bar association listings, and anywhere else the firm or its attorneys appear. When those sources disagree with each other, prospects get confused, and search engines have a harder time deciding which version to trust.
Law firms have an extra wrinkle here. Google’s guidelines for representing your business on Google treat lawyers as individual practitioners, which means an individual attorney may have their own Business Profile in addition to the firm’s. The same guidelines say a practitioner should be contactable directly at the verified location during the stated hours, and that a practitioner shouldn’t have multiple profiles to cover different specializations. In practice, that means a single attorney’s name, office address, phone number, and hours can appear on the firm site, the firm’s profile, and the attorney’s own profile, and all three need to tell the same story.
A good habit is to treat the website as the source of truth and update everything else from it. When an attorney changes offices, gets a new direct line, or leaves the firm, the website gets updated first, and then the related Google profiles and directory listings get updated to match. If your site uses structured data to describe the firm’s name, address, and phone number to search engines, that markup should be checked at the same time, since it often lives in a template where nobody thinks to look.
A simple rhythm for keeping it current
None of this requires a big annual overhaul. It works best as a light, steady routine with a few clear triggers, so the website gets updated when the firm changes instead of years later.
Here’s a cadence that works well for most small firms and solo practices:
- Whenever someone joins or leaves, update their bio, every practice page that names them, the attorney directory, contact routing, and their Google profile within the same week.
- Whenever the firm adds, drops, or reshapes a practice area, update that page and every page that links to it, including the homepage and navigation.
- Every quarter, have each attorney skim their own bio and the practice pages for their area and flag anything that is wrong, missing, or out of date.
- Every quarter, test each contact path on the site: call the listed numbers, submit each form, and confirm the right person received it.
- Once a year, review bar admissions, certifications, awards, case results, and disclaimers against your state bar’s current rules, and refresh headshots if they are more than a few years old.
The quarterly attorney review is the piece firms most often skip, and it’s also the cheapest. Each attorney knows their own credentials better than anyone, and reading one bio and two or three practice pages takes about fifteen minutes. The hard part is getting the changes they flag actually made on the website, by someone who knows how to make them without breaking the layout, losing a disclaimer, or leaving a dead link behind.
That’s usually where things stall. A small firm doesn’t have a web team. The office manager has a login to the site but isn’t comfortable editing it, the person who built it moved on, and the list of small corrections keeps growing until it feels like a redesign is the only answer.
This is exactly the kind of ongoing work a managed website is built for. With NorthMac’s managed website service, your site is built, hosted, updated, secured, monitored, and supported for one monthly price. When an attorney joins, a practice area changes, or a phone number moves, you send the request and we handle it, along with the redirects, contact routing, and small details that tend to get missed. Update requests are unlimited and handled one at a time, so your bios and practice pages keep pace with your firm as it grows and changes.
If you’re ready for your website to be handled, start your managed website with NorthMac for $47, or see everything that’s included first.
