Law firm website design companies: what you contract for

A website design company sells a contract, not a website. Three clauses decide what a firm ends up owning: the schedule of pages, the copyright assignment, and the transfer list at exit. Of 40 legal-marketing suppliers read in full on 3 August 2026, 12 published a price at all.

Last updated: 5 August 2026

What are you actually contracting for?

A schedule, not a site. "A new website" names an outcome, and an outcome is not a deliverable.

The difference shows up at the first disagreement. A contract that says "a modern, responsive website for the firm" gives neither side anything to point at. A contract that says eleven pages, named, two rounds of amendments on each, content supplied by the firm within twenty working days, acceptance deemed on the seventh day after handover unless a defect is raised in writing gives both sides the same document to argue from.

Five things belong in that schedule and are missing from most proposals:

1. The page count, itemised. Not "practice area pages" but how many, and which.
2. Rounds of amendment, numbered, with the price of a further round stated.
3. Who writes the words, and the date the firm's material is due.
4. What acceptance means, and what happens if nobody at the firm looks at it for a month.
5. Whether the price and service pages are inside the scope or billed as an extra.

The fifth is where scope disputes concentrate in England and Wales, and it is a commercial question rather than a regulatory one. Whichever pages the firm decides it needs — and that decision sits with the firm and its COLP, never with a supplier — those pages either appear in the schedule with a number beside them or they arrive later as a variation at whatever the supplier quotes then.

The commercial reason to settle it early: 15 of the 62 questions buyers ask on these searches are price questions, the largest single group in the set measured on 3 August 2026. Pages that answer the most-asked question in the market should be inside the deliverable, not an appendix to it.

Which questions separate a build from a subscription with a design attached?

Six, and every one of them is answerable in a sentence by a company that intends to hand something over.

The distinction is not the price and it is not the monthly figure. Plenty of good arrangements are monthly. The distinction is whether the asset survives the relationship ending. A site the firm cannot move is a subscription with a design attached, and it is worth exactly as much as the next renewal conversation.

One of the 40 suppliers we read on 3 August 2026 stated that its work carried no minimum term. That is not the same as a transfer clause, but it is the nearest published proxy, and it tells you how rare it is for the exit to be addressed at all before the exit.

What belongs on the transfer list, and when should it be written?

Everything below, written into the contract at signature rather than requested in an email eight months later.

Ask for the list before signature and read the answer as evidence rather than as reassurance. A company that has handed a site over before has this written down already, because it has been asked.

Which of these companies publish a price you can put in a contract?

One of the four named here did, on the date we checked.

Across all 40 suppliers read in full that day:

⚠ The benchmark records presence, not amount. No figure is attributed to any named business anywhere in this programme, because the tooling that read those pages picked up case values and fragments alongside genuine fees.

The consequence for a contract is narrow and specific. A price you cannot see before the meeting is a price that gets set inside the meeting, against a scope drafted by the party who wrote the proposal. Every clause on this page is easier to negotiate when the number was published first.

What do we charge, and what sits outside the scope?

Both halves of that question, because a price without an exclusion list is half a quotation.

Take £700 off a build taken with six months of retainer. Charging by scope rather than by outcome is not a preference: section 56 of LASPO 2012 makes referral fees in prescribed legal business a problem for the paying firm as much as for the party paid, so a fee tied to enquiries, leads or matters is one we will not write into a contract.

For scale, £2,400 is roughly what 167 Birmingham residential conveyancing clicks cost at Google's own price of £14.36, measured on 3 August 2026. That is 167 × £14.36 = £2,398.12, which is arithmetic on a click price and not a forecast of anything.

The exclusion list, stated here rather than discovered in month three: ad spend and its management, telephone answering, case management software, and sign-off on the wording. Every page we draft goes back to the firm before publication because the firm is the only party that can approve what it says.

A damaging admission: month one produces no enquiries and we invoice for it anyway. A build month is a build month, and any supplier implying otherwise is selling the second month's report during the first month's work.

Where is another company the better choice?

Two situations, and both are about the contract rather than the craft.

When the site has a known short life. A firm mid-merger, or one that expects to rebrand inside two years, is buying something disposable. Most of the clauses above earn their keep over five or six years, and a firm that will not keep the asset that long should buy the cheapest thing that renders properly and spend the difference elsewhere.

When the firm already retains a developer it trusts. If somebody in the building or on a maintenance contract keeps the site working, this page is a document you can hand them rather than a reason to change supplier. The schedule and the transfer list are the useful part, and neither requires our invoice.

Before you shortlist anyone

Before the six questions get put to anybody, it is worth knowing how unusual a published number is. Forty legal-marketing suppliers were read end to end in August 2026, one of them named above. Twelve published a price. One offered work with no minimum term.

The report names all forty, so the count is repeatable instead of something taken on trust. It adds two things no supplier will hand you: how many people search your practice areas in your own town, and what those clicks cost 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?

For what is inside a build rather than what the contract says about it: law firm website design services.

For the site as one line in a wider budget: law firm marketing services, and for the searches once the site is sound, law firm SEO marketing.

If the question is what the site is for rather than who builds it: law firm marketing website. At two or three fee earners: small law firm marketing.

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