Most people reading your reviews already have your name. It came from a friend, a former client, a referral, or an assistant that gave a careful general answer and then told them to speak with a licensed attorney nearby. This page is about getting those reviews asked for properly and answered in public without disclosing a thing about a client.
Book a free consultation →A plumber's reviews get read by someone who has never heard of the plumber. A law firm's reviews usually get read by someone who already has your name and is deciding whether to keep an appointment they have half made already. That is a different job, and a few things follow from it.
The general version of this service, written for any kind of business, is on the reputation management hub. What a firm spends money on besides reviews is laid out on law firms and in the law firm marketing guide. This page stays on the reviews.
Two different rulebooks land on a law firm's review program, and they get blurred together constantly. They say different things, so separate them.
The platform and advertising rules apply to everybody. Review gating, screening people first and sending only the ones you expect to be happy to a public review form, is against Google's policy. The FTC's review rule reaches a related set of things: writing, buying or trading for reviews that are not genuine, and paying for a review on the condition that it be a favorable one. None of that is a legal-industry rule. It lands on your firm exactly the way it lands on a roofing company. So the public ask does not get filtered by who seems pleased.
Your state bar's rules govern what a testimonial may say. That is the part specific to you, and it reaches content rather than audience: no implied guarantee of results, nothing suggesting a past outcome predicts a future one, and in a number of states a required disclaimer wherever a client testimonial or a prior result is published. The rules differ state to state and they change. Your firm owns that compliance, not a vendor, so we build to whatever read your firm or its ethics counsel gives us and we ask for that read before anything ships.
With those two straight, the program itself is not complicated:
One distinction worth being precise about, because firms get bad advice on it. Leaving a whole category of matter out of the program, or honoring a client who asked to stay private, is not gating. Gating is sorting individual people by how happy you think they are before deciding who gets the public ask. The first is a policy you can write down and defend. The second is what Google's policy prohibits.
This is the part of reputation work that is genuinely riskier for a law firm than for any other business we build for, and it is the reason this page exists separately at all.
Your duty of confidentiality does not switch off because a client complained about you in public. State bars have disciplined attorneys for answering a negative review with the facts of the matter, and the pull to correct the record is strongest exactly when the review is unfair. A reply written in the first twenty minutes after reading one is the most expensive paragraph on a law firm's internet.
So the drafts work off a fixed list of what never appears in a public reply:
What survives that list is short and a little dull, which is correct. Three lines: that the firm read it, that the firm keeps every client matter out of public forums as a standing policy, and an invitation to call, with the number and the name of whoever takes those calls. To a prospect, that reads as professional discipline. It is also the only version that does not create a second problem on top of the first.
For a review from someone who was never a client, the room is narrower still. Content that actually breaks the platform's own rules, spam, an off-topic post, a clear conflict of interest, can be reported, and platforms do take some of those down. Nobody can tell you in advance which way that goes. Past that, a neutral reply that neither confirms nor denies any relationship is where most firms land, and that call is yours, not ours. We draft, your approver reads, and nothing posts under the firm's name that a person at the firm has not read first.
Google is where the volume is. It is not where the surprises are.
Someone handed your name looks up the firm, then looks up the individual attorney, and that second search pulls in sources you never set up. Several legal directories build a profile for a licensed attorney whether or not anyone at the firm ever claimed it. Avvo, Justia, Martindale-Hubbell, Lawyers.com and Yelp all carry attorney reviews or ratings of one kind or another, and one of those profiles can sit for years listing a practice area you dropped, an address you left, or a rating assembled out of two reviews. Nobody at the firm notices, because nobody at the firm searches their own name.
What gets set up:
Where those reviews then do their ranking work in the map pack is local SEO for law firms. How they get built into the pages and disclaimed properly is part of websites for law firms. Both of those are their own jobs, with their own scope.
Nothing is built or billed until the pieces are written down with a price beside each. A firm will not find a standing reputation retainer, a per-review charge, or a subscription tier here, because none of us could say honestly what the firm would be buying in month seven. You get a written list of the pieces and a number, and then work starts.
The number usually attaches to one of two things.
The request tool. It is built as a custom tool, coded for your firm and yours to keep whether or not you keep us on afterward. Most workhorse custom tools run $1,500 to $4,000, and a request tool with one approval step sits toward the lighter end of that range. Upkeep after launch is Tool Care at $75 a month per tool, and it is optional.
Ongoing work that already includes it. When the asking, the monitoring and the reply drafting sit inside an SEO or local SEO engagement, they are part of that scope and not a separate invoice. That work runs $1,500 to $3,500 a month for most businesses, and $3,500 to $7,500 a month in competitive metros or for multi-location businesses. It is month to month with no long-term contract, and your site, your content, your profiles and your accounts stay yours.
Anything outside those two gets a flat quote after a free consult rather than a guess printed on a web page. How much SEO costs explains what moves that monthly number.
We built a one-tap review-request tool for a New Jersey glass and mirror shop. The mechanics of a short link that lands someone on a review form carry straight over to a firm. The constraints do not, which is why a version built for a law practice adds the approval step, the confidentiality list the replies are drafted against, and the disclaimer handling, all of it settled before a single message goes out. Kelly Webmasters and Marketers is Orlando-based, working with local service businesses nationwide since 2008.
The refusals deserve the same plain statement. No written, bought, or incentivized reviews. No gating. No promise to remove an honest negative review, because a truthful one from a real client is not going anywhere and anyone telling you otherwise is either guessing or planning something against the rules. And no promise of a rating or a review count by a date, because the people writing them do not work for either of us.
If you would rather look before you talk, the free tools and a free mockup are both reasonable first steps. Otherwise call (407) 694-2055 or use the quote form and tell us who currently signs off on public replies.
Yes, as long as the reply says nothing about the person or the matter. That means no confirmation they were a client, no facts, no correcting their version. What is left is three lines: the firm read it, the firm keeps client matters out of public forums as a standing policy, and here is a number and the name of who answers it. The next person comparing firms reads that as discipline, and it does not create a second problem.
Flag it if it actually breaks the platform's policies. Spam, off-topic content, and a clear conflict of interest are the categories that sometimes get removed. Beyond that, most firms post a neutral reply that neither confirms nor denies any relationship, since even denying a relationship can say more than you want said. That call belongs to your firm rather than to us. We draft options and you choose one.
Generally the rules in this area govern what a testimonial says rather than who may be asked. The usual constraints are no implied guarantee of results, nothing suggesting a past outcome predicts a future one, and a required disclaimer in some states wherever a testimonial or prior result is published. Rules differ by state and they change, so we build to your firm's own read or your ethics counsel's, and we ask for it up front.
Not one tied to the review. Google's policy rules out offering anything in exchange for a review, the FTC's rule bans rewarding a review on the condition that it be favorable, and the professional rules on giving something of value for a recommendation point the same way. It also tends to backfire, because a reader who suspects one review was bought starts discounting the rest. The request goes out with nothing attached to it, which is the only version that holds up.
It works, but the plan has to account for it. Estate planning and business clients sign their names readily. Criminal defense, family, and bankruptcy clients frequently will not, and pressing them is a bad trade. That usually means a smaller, slower stream of reviews from the practice areas where a public name is comfortable, plus more weight on the replies and on how reviews are presented on your own site.
Several states require one wherever a client testimonial or a prior result appears, and the required wording is specific to the state. We treat that as a build requirement rather than a footnote: the disclaimer sits with the testimonial, at a size a person can read, on every page where the testimonial appears. Your firm confirms the wording, since the compliance obligation is the firm's, not ours.
It is scoped and priced before work starts, not sold as an open-ended monthly fee. The request tool is built as a custom tool, toward the lighter end of the $1,500 to $4,000 range most workhorse tools fall in, with optional Tool Care at $75 a month per tool. When the asking, monitoring and replies sit inside broader ongoing work instead, that runs $1,500 to $3,500 a month for most businesses. Everything is month to month.
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Tell us how reviews reach your firm today and who is allowed to answer them in public, and we will scope the piece that is actually missing. Call or text (407) 694-2055, or email [email protected].
Book a free consultation → Or call/text directly: (407) 694-2055Tell us a little about the business and we will come back with an honest read: what we would fix first, what it costs, and whether you need us at all. Prefer to see work before you talk numbers? Get a free homepage mockup, built for your business, yours to keep either way.
Brandon reads every one of these himself. You will hear back shortly with an honest read on what we would do first, what it costs, and whether it is worth it for you.