Law firm website design agencies: who actually does the work

Three people build a law firm website: a designer, a developer and a writer. Most fees buy the first two well and the third badly. Of 40 legal-marketing suppliers read in full on 3 August 2026, 12 published a price, so the split between the three is almost never visible before signature.

Last updated: 5 August 2026

Who actually does the work when a firm retains an agency?

Three roles, whatever the agency is called and however many people sit behind the logo.

The designer decides what the pages look like and how they behave on a phone. This is the part every agency shows you, because it photographs well and it is the part a partner has an opinion about.

The developer turns that into something a browser and a search engine can both read. This is the part nobody asks about and the part that decides whether the site is fast, whether the text exists before scripts run, and whether the firm can move the site later.

The writer produces the sentences. On a law firm's site this is the role with the domain problem: the words describe regulated services, funding arrangements, timescales and complaints routes, and they are read by people making a decision under stress.

An agency can be one person doing all three, a studio of specialists, or a design shop that subcontracts the second and third. All three arrangements can work. What does not work is not knowing which you have bought, and the question is answerable in a sentence: who, by name, writes the practice-area pages, and have they written for a firm before?

Which of the three is your fee really buying?

Usually the designer, because that is the part being sold and the part being compared.

The third row is where most builds actually fail, and it fails quietly. A firm agrees to supply content because it seems reasonable and because fee earners are the people who know the work. Then the fee earners bill six-minute units against matters that pay, the content never arrives, and eight weeks later somebody at the agency writes it in an afternoon from the old site.

15 of the 62 questions buyers ask on these searches are price questions, measured on 3 August 2026. If the fee is a single number with no split, you cannot tell whether the writing was priced at all, and the answer arrives as a change order.

Ask for the split in writing. Not the agency's margins — the hours or the days against each of the three roles. An agency that has thought about it answers; an agency that has not will offer a revised total instead.

Who writes the words on a law firm's website?

One of four people, and the choice has more effect on the result than the design does.

1. A fee earner at the firm. The most accurate and the slowest. Works when one person is given the task with a deadline and a word count, and fails when it is "everybody, when they have a moment".
2. A writer inside the agency. Fast, consistent, and dependent entirely on whether they have written for a regulated profession before.
3. A freelance legal copywriter. Often the best result per pound. Needs someone to brief and edit them, which is a job the agency should be doing.
4. Nobody — the old site, reworded. The default when the other three were not decided, and the reason so many firm websites describe the same service in the same three sentences.

There is a fifth answer now, which is a drafting tool with a person editing after it. The programme takes a view on that elsewhere and it is not the argument of this page. The relevant point here is narrower: whoever or whatever produces a first draft, somebody at the firm signs the page off before it is published, and that person needs to be named in the schedule with a date beside them.

What goes wrong when nobody in the chain has read a retainer letter?

Six specific failures, all of them repairable before publication and expensive afterwards.

None of these are design failures. They come from a writing chain in which the words are produced by somebody who has never seen the letter the firm sends a new client, and reviewed by nobody at the firm because review was not in anyone's schedule.

The fix is procedural rather than clever: a named reviewer at the firm, a named date, and a rule that nothing goes live without both. Whether any of it satisfies the firm's obligations is a judgement for the firm and its COLP, and no agency can take that on.

Which of these agencies published a price when we checked?

One of the four, on 3 August 2026.

Across all 40 suppliers read in full that day:

⚠ The benchmark records presence, not amount, and it says nothing at all about how any of these four staffs its work. No fee is attributed to a named business anywhere in this programme, because the tooling that read those pages picked up case values and fragments alongside genuine prices.

How is our own work staffed, and what does it cost?

Published, fixed, and the same figure whether you ring us or not.

Take £700 off a build taken with six months of retainer. Nothing is priced per enquiry, per lead or per matter, for the LASPO reason set out above.

The writing is inside those figures rather than beside them. For scale, the £1,200 retainer is roughly 46 Manchester family law clicks at Google's own price of £25.88, measured on 3 August 2026 — 46 × £25.88 = £1,190.48, which is arithmetic on a click price and not a forecast.

A damaging admission: we do not employ solicitors and we do not check copy for regulatory risk. Every page goes back to the firm for sign-off, and when nobody at the firm has an hour to read it, the page does not publish and the programme stalls. That delay is a genuine cost of working this way, and we would rather you priced it in now than discovered it in week six.

Where is another agency the better choice?

Two cases, both about who is available rather than who is better.

When the firm has a marketing manager already. Somebody in the building can walk to a partner's door and get the material an external supplier waits three weeks for. That advantage is real and no agency arrangement reproduces it. A firm in that position should buy hands rather than a team.

When the commission is a brand rather than a site. A mark, guidelines and a tone of voice is a design job with its own craft, and the studios that do it well are not the ones that do this well. We build pages that answer searches, which is narrower.

Before you shortlist anyone

We read 40 legal-marketing suppliers in full in August 2026, including one named on this page. Twelve published a price. One offered work with no minimum term.

The free report gives you the full count, named, so you can repeat the exercise rather than take ours. It also shows how many people search for your practice areas in your town, and what those clicks cost to buy at Google's own prices.

Get the report — five questions, about two minutes →

No call required. Our own prices are on that page.

Where should I read next?

On whether the search work is worth staffing at all: does SEO work for law firms?

On who inside a firm should own this and where they sit: what are the ranks in a law firm? and how to get ranked in Legal 500?

On the channel choice before the staffing choice: what is the best way to advertise a law firm?

At two or three fee earners, where one person does all three roles: what are the marketing ideas for small law firms?

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