Ten rules for what a serious firm's website is. Every one can be checked by anyone, on any firm's site, in about a minute. A site either meets them or it does not.
Why a standard. A law firm's website is the first document most clients ever read from the firm, and the profession that holds every other document to a standard has never had one for this. The result is a market of rented templates carrying trackers, overlay widgets and unverifiable claims, distinguished from one another mainly by price.
The rules below are not aesthetic preferences. Each one protects something specific: the client's confidentiality, the firm's compliance record, or the simple ability of a person in trouble to reach a lawyer. Each one states how to check it, because a rule nobody can verify is a slogan.
Clients arrive from a referral, at night, on a phone. Every second of loading is a percentage of them gone, and the firm never learns they existed.
Weight is where template platforms fail structurally: page builders cannot produce a light page, so this rule cannot be met by reskinning one.
No trackers, no analytics pixels, no accessibility overlays, no font CDNs, no chat widgets. A person researching a divorce or a criminal charge must not be followed around the internet because they read a law firm's website.
The site has one conversion and it is the phone ringing. A number that scrolls away is a number that does not get called.
A firm cannot spend an hour on a matter it must then decline. A website built by someone who knows this asks who else is involved before it asks anything else.
No invented awards, no stock courthouse photographs, no founding years nobody can document, no client counts nobody audited. Fewer true facts read better than many decorative ones, and the bar agrees.
Specialist, expert, guarantee, best, and unqualified result figures are Rule 7.2 and 7.4 problems. A serious site refuses to publish them mechanically, the way a spell checker refuses a misspelling, because a policy someone must remember will eventually be forgotten.
The disclaimer block is not small print to be minimised. It is the mark of a firm that knows exactly what its website is under the rules.
When anyone asks what the firm's website said on a given date, the answer should be a file, not a memory. Almost no vendor offers this because almost no vendor knows the retention expectation exists.
A rented site is leverage against the firm the day it wants to leave. The code, the content and the domain belong to the firm, in writing, from day one.
The Counsel Standard is maintained by BlackRain Automations, Vernon, Connecticut · (860) 803-2795. Version 1.0, published August 2026. Sites built by BlackRain conform to it by construction; any firm's site can be checked against it by anyone, using nothing above.