The source says 63 of the UK's Top 100 law firms lead their homepages with the firm before mentioning a client problem. It also reports detailed findings from 40 firms: enquiry responses, portal visibility, mobile failures, accessibility errors and score thresholds.
These could be valuable original research. The project contains no firm list, selection record, fieldwork date, raw observations, consent or ethical approach to submitting enquiries. Until those records are available, none of the prevalence figures or ranks is safe to publish.
A benchmark without an inspectable method becomes opinion with decimal places. This version preserves the six assessment areas, corrects technical weaknesses and shows how a law firm can use them without claiming an unverified sector position.
Define the journey before the score
The source simulated three buyers: a business seeking M&A advice, an individual with a complex private-client matter and an employer seeking employment support. Those scenarios involve different urgency, sophistication, sensitivity and contact needs.
A reproducible benchmark should publish:
- Firms and selection method
- Fieldwork dates and website versions
- Buyer scenarios and task scripts
- Devices, browsers and assistive methods
- Scoring anchors and weighting
- Assessors and disagreement process
- Treatment of authenticated services
- Enquiry research method, data handling and follow-up
- Limitations and corrections route
The output should show observations alongside scores. A total can hide one critical failure beneath several minor successes.
Six areas a legal buyer experiences
Finding appropriate expertise
Can a buyer with a defined problem locate the relevant service, sector and person? Practice-area navigation may reflect the firm's internal organisation while the client thinks in transactions, disputes, events or industries.
Test from search, referral and homepage routes. Avoid a rigid “two clicks” rule; a short route can still be confusing, and a longer one may provide useful context.
Content and evidence
Does the firm explain client situations and show suitably approved experience? Are people profiles specific, current and connected to relevant thinking?
Awards and rankings can support confidence. They should not be the only proof a buyer encounters. Legal content also needs ownership and review when law, people or service details change.
Authenticated client experience
Public observation can establish whether a login is visible and whether the route appears coherent. It cannot establish portal usefulness, accessibility or security after authentication.
Test portals with authorised accounts, synthetic data and representative tasks: find a document, understand matter status, review billing, provide information and reach the team. The absence of a portal should be assessed against client need and alternative secure service, rather than scored automatically as failure.
Use on a phone or tablet
Test important journeys on relevant devices. Look at navigation, content readability, forms, people search, login and transfer to another channel.
The source reports full-resolution portraits and pages taking more than eight seconds. Those observations need URLs, conditions and dates. Performance changes and should be measured under a declared method.
Enquiry and response
The source says it completed forms at all 40 firms and that 11 received no response within five business days. This research may have created personal data, operational work and unsolicited test enquiries. Publication requires the protocol, lawful and ethical basis, fieldwork evidence and an appropriate way to avoid wasting firms' time.
A client can test its own route more safely. Submit approved internal or monitored enquiries, verify routing and measure acknowledgement, ownership, conflict or eligibility handling and useful response. A two-hour response is not a universal standard. Set expectations the firm can meet for each service.
Accessibility
Automated tools find a subset of accessibility issues; they do not certify conformance. The source incorrectly described automated “WCAG 2.1 AA compliance testing” and inferred screen-reader compatibility from an outside review.
Use the current Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2 as the technical reference where appropriate, combining automated checks with skilled manual assessment and user research. Legal obligations need qualified advice for the relevant service and jurisdiction.
What good looks like without a league table
Strong legal experiences share observable qualities.
They help a buyer recognise a problem and relevant expertise without translating the firm's structure. They show people and approved evidence. They make next steps clear and preserve context. Mobile use is deliberate. Accessibility is part of design and content practice. Authenticated services support real client tasks.
These qualities should be tested, rather than inferred from visual polish or firm rank. A regional specialist can outperform a global firm on a particular journey because the comparison concerns service design, not prestige.
The source's sector insight is worth keeping: clarity, attention and responsiveness in the digital experience can reinforce the qualities a client wants from legal advice. It would be too strong to infer advice quality from a website defect. Digital signals shape confidence; they do not prove legal competence.
Common gaps to investigate
Firm-centred copy. Homepage and practice text may foreground awards, history and departments while leaving the client to infer relevance.
Thin or stale evidence. Confidentiality can lead to generic cases; weak ownership leaves departed people and superseded commentary visible.
Contact friction and routing failure. Long forms, vague expectations or unowned inboxes can waste high-intent demand. Risk and conflict needs may justify some questions.
Invisible authenticated service. Clients may struggle to locate login or support, even when the underlying service exists.
Mobile journeys designed after desktop. Touch, document reading, search and forms require task testing.
Accessibility treated as a late check. Content structure, labels, contrast, keyboard use, focus and error handling need continuing ownership.
These are hypotheses until observed in the firm's own experience or supported by auditable sector data.
A self-assessment that avoids invented thresholds
The source provides a 48-point score and claims scores below 30 or 20 correspond to sector halves and quartiles. Those cut-offs cannot survive without raw benchmark data.
Use a profile instead. For each priority journey, mark:
- Supported by evidence
- Partly supported or inconsistent
- Unsupported
- Unknown or outside current assessment
Ask:
- Can the buyer identify suitable expertise and a person?
- Does evidence show relevant situations, role and current thinking?
- Is the contact route usable, proportionate and owned?
- Can clients complete important authenticated tasks?
- Do mobile and assistive journeys work?
- Are content, people, regulatory information and accessibility maintained?
Record evidence, severity, confidence and owner. A critical broken enquiry route should outrank several easy content improvements.
Turn comparison into a decision
Law-firm investment debates stall when partners compare opinions about design. Journey evidence allows a different conversation: which buyer or client task fails, what consequence follows and what is the smallest responsible response?
Some gaps can be repaired through content, routing, accessibility remediation or ownership. Others expose platform or operating limits that justify discovery. A benchmark should not make a rebuild inevitable.
If you want a structured version to share internally when making the case for investment, we've put together a downloadable version with a proper scoring methodology. Download the self-assessment checklist below.
The encouraging thing? None of these gaps require a wholesale rebuild. The firms that score well in our assessment haven't necessarily spent more money. They've spent it on the right things.
If you want something more specific than a self-assessment - a structured review that benchmarks your firm against your actual competitive set rather than the sector average - that's something we do. Book a scoping conversation and we'll tell you exactly what's involved.
