A law firm website is now table stakes, or so the assumption goes. The American Bar Association measured it and found something stranger. In its 2024 Legal Technology Survey, 90% of responding firms had a website, down from 94% two years earlier.
So the number moved the wrong way. In a period when every other industry pushed harder online, a slice of the legal profession quietly stepped back.
The Retreat Shows Up Twice
Websites were not the only measure that slipped. Use of social media as a marketing tool fell to 80%, down from 89% in 2022.
Both numbers moved together, which suggests something broader than a technical choice. Firms are not switching channels. Several are simply doing less.
Meanwhile the largest firms held steady. Every firm with 100 or more attorneys reported having a website, so the decline sits entirely among smaller practices where marketing competes with billable hours.
Solo Practices Are the Exception, and the Opportunity
One figure moved upward. Solo practitioners reporting a website rose to 70%, up from 61% in 2022.
Read that alongside the overall decline and a picture forms. The solos who never had a site are getting one, while some established small firms are letting theirs go stale or dropping them.
Still, 70% leaves nearly a third of solo practitioners with nothing at all. In most industries that would be unthinkable. In law it is a live and measured fact, and it is the cheapest competitive gap available to anyone willing to close it.
Why Firms Rate Their Own Marketing Poorly
The ABA also asked firms how confident they felt about their marketing. Larger firms rated themselves 3.3 out of 5, whereas solos and small firms came in at 2.7.
That gap is not really about skill. It reflects who has someone whose job this is. The report notes that firms with an in-house marketing team stay on top of platforms, while solo and small-firm lawyers balance marketing against everything else practice management demands.
So the honest diagnosis for most small firms is capacity, not ability. Knowing what to do is rarely the blocker. Having an uninterrupted hour to do it is.
What a Law Firm Website Has to Do
A prospective client arrives frightened, or angry, or both. They are not comparing credentials in a calm frame of mind.
Which means the site has one job before any other: tell them quickly whether you handle their kind of problem, and what happens next. Everything else can wait.
- One page per practice area, named the way a client would say it.
- A plain answer on cost, even if it is only how you charge.
- What the first call is like, and how long it takes.
- Named attorneys with real bios, not stock headshots.
- A way to make contact that gets answered the same day.
That list is unglamorous, and it outperforms redesigns. Most firms lose clients on the second item, since silence about fees reads as a warning to someone already worried about money.
Consistency Beats Polish
When marketing competes with billable work, ambition becomes the enemy. A quarterly plan nobody executes returns nothing at all.
Better to pick something small and genuinely repeatable. One useful page a month beats a redesign that stalls in April, and it compounds in a way a launch never does.
The declining ABA numbers suggest many firms learned this the hard way. A presence nobody maintains eventually goes dark, and that is what the survey counted.
Where to Start This Quarter
Look at your practice area pages first. Most read like a table of contents rather than an answer to a worried question.
Rewrite one of them properly, using the words clients actually use rather than the statutory language. Then check that the contact route on that page reaches a person the same day, since a fast reply beats a polished page.
Referrals Get Checked Before They Get Called
Lawyers often argue that referrals make a law firm website unnecessary. The referral itself makes the site more important, not less.
Someone hands a name to a friend in trouble. That friend searches the name before calling, and what they find either confirms the recommendation or quietly kills it.
A thin or missing site turns a warm referral into a cold decision. Meanwhile a clear one closes it before the phone rings, which is the cheapest client acquisition available to a small firm.
This is why the ABA numbers matter beyond the headline. Firms cutting back are not saving money so much as taxing every referral they receive.
The Hour a Week That Actually Works
Given the confidence gap the ABA measured, the realistic question is not what a firm should do but what it will sustain.
One protected hour a week beats an ambitious quarterly plan. Book it like a client meeting, and spend it on one page, one update, or one review reply.
Choose the work by what a worried client needs next rather than by what feels modern. A clear fee explanation outperforms a rebrand, and it takes an hour rather than a season.
Review Replies Are Marketing Too
Prospective clients read reviews before they read your law firm website, and they read your replies more closely than the reviews themselves.
A calm, brief response to a bad review does more good than a dozen five-star ratings. It shows how you behave when something goes wrong, which is exactly what a nervous client is trying to work out.
Keep replies short and never argue the facts of a matter in public. Thank them, note that you take it seriously, and offer a direct line.
After that, decide honestly whether the next page will get written. If not, the answer is help rather than a plan. We offer a free website analysis and handle web design and development for firms that would rather bill their hours.
