Compliant web design and SEO for New Zealand law firms

Yes. The patterns the New Zealand Law Society tends to flag are well known: superlatives like "best" or "leading", undefined awards, "specialist" claims by lawyers who do not hold LCANZI accreditation in that area, comparative claims against named competitors, and testimonials that imply a typical case outcome. We write copy with those rules in mind from the first draft and bake the safe framings into your practice-area pages and lawyer profiles. We do not give legal advice on your own marketing, so for high-stakes pages we recommend a final review by your firm's compliance lead or a Law Society inquiry before publish. In our experience, that two-step process catches anything that needs softening before it goes live.

Three big differences. First, compliance: copy has to respect the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act 2006 and the Conduct and Client Care Rules 2008, which restrict superlatives, comparative claims, and specialisation claims without proper accreditation. Second, intake: a law firm enquiry needs conflict-check details, matter type, and urgency before a lawyer can responsibly engage, so the form is not a name-and-email contact box. Third, confidentiality: sensitive material has to be transmitted securely, and the site needs to make clear that submitting a form does not create a lawyer-client relationship. A generic web designer will miss all three, because none of them are visible problems on a tradie or e-commerce site.

Yes, lawyers can run Google Ads in New Zealand, with two layers of rules to respect. Google has its own legal-services advertising policies, which mostly come into play around specific verticals like bail bonds (not relevant here) and require accurate descriptions of the legal service offered. Underneath that, your Google Ads copy is still marketing under the Conduct and Client Care Rules 2008, so the same restrictions on "best", "specialist", and comparative claims apply. We write ad copy with both layers in mind, run tightly geo-targeted campaigns on matter-specific keywords, and use dedicated landing pages per practice area so the visitor lands somewhere relevant. Done properly, Google Ads for legal sits between $30 and $150 per qualified enquiry depending on practice area and city, with the high-value commercial and employment matters at the top of that range.

A few practical things. The form transmits over HTTPS by default on every site we build, so the submission itself is encrypted in transit. We add a clear privacy and confidentiality statement next to the submit button, including that the enquiry does not create a lawyer-client relationship until a retainer is signed. For matters that involve documents (employment disputes, estate work, property files), we set up a secure document upload that writes to access-controlled storage, not an unprotected email inbox. We also recommend not using third-party form services that route submissions through external servers in jurisdictions you have not vetted. None of this is exotic, it is just the version of intake that takes the professional obligation seriously.

Yes, every named lawyer in the firm should have their own page. Three reasons. One: prospective clients Google a lawyer by name before they instruct, and if your firm site does not surface a credible profile, they end up on LinkedIn or LawConnect with no path back to your intake. Two: a proper profile with admission year, practice areas, LCANZI accreditation where held, professional memberships, and recent matters or publications gives the prospect the credibility signal they are looking for. Three: each lawyer profile becomes a searchable page in its own right, often ranking for lawyer-name searches and for "[practice area] lawyer [city]" queries. The firms we have seen do this well treat lawyer pages as the second-most important pages on the site after the practice-area pages.

They look the same because most are built from the same handful of legal templates with the colours swapped. That is exactly the problem. A vendor researching three firms cannot tell why you are the better pick from a template homepage with stock columns and a courtroom photo. The firms winning the brief have specific copy about how they work with clients, real lawyer profiles with verifiable credentials, content that demonstrates depth in their practice areas, and an intake process that respects the matter. None of that requires reinventing the wheel, it just requires building the site for your firm rather than for "law firms" as a generic category. That is the work we do.

I do not publish a fixed price list because a four-page site for a sole practitioner is a different job to a fifteen-page site with eight lawyer profiles for a mid-size commercial firm. As a directional range, most law firm sites with us sit between $1,500 and $7,000, depending on the number of pages and lawyer profiles. Local SEO retainers typically sit at $1,500 to $3,500 per month, month to month with no lock-in. Google Ads management is quoted per account after a free audit, on top of your ad budget. Every engagement is custom-scoped after a discovery call so the investment matches the actual work, and you get an itemised proposal before anything starts.