How to Get More Google Reviews for a Law Firm

Nearly all the advice a firm gets about reviews was written for restaurants. Ask every customer, make it easy, reply to everyone. Then a managing partner thinks about the last twenty matters that closed, works out how many of those clients would rather not have their name publicly attached to the reason they called, and quietly drops the whole idea.

That instinct is correct about a portion of the book and wrong about the rest. The cost of never separating the two is a firm sitting on six reviews while the firm across the street has ninety.

Sort the book before you write a single request

This takes twenty minutes and it decides everything that follows. Take your matter types and drop each one into a bucket.

• Ask freely. Business formation and disputes, commercial real estate, estate planning, advisory employment work, and much of personal injury, where a client is often glad to say who got them through it. Nothing about these makes somebody reluctant to be seen as your client.
• Ask selectively. Bankruptcy, parts of family law, plaintiff-side employment. Some clients here are willing and some aren't, and the only way to know is that you know them.
• Don't ask. Criminal defense, most immigration work, family matters involving children, and anything where a public link to your firm tells the world something the client has worked hard to keep private.

Most firms discover in that exercise that a solid half of the book was never the problem. The criminal side had been setting the policy for the estate planning side without anybody deciding it should.

The people you stopped counting as clients

Two groups get missed by almost every firm that otherwise runs this well.

The first is the consultation you didn't take. Somebody called, you spent forty minutes explaining they had no case or that they needed a different kind of lawyer, and you pointed them somewhere better. They have a real experience of your firm, and a fair number of them are grateful in a way a paying client rarely is. Nothing stops them saying so publicly.

The second is the matter that closed four years ago. Firms treat the request as something that happens at the end of a matter, which quietly makes every client who finished before the program started invisible to it. A short, plain note to a former client in an askable category is perfectly legitimate, and for a firm starting from nine reviews it's the fastest volume available anywhere.

What doesn't count, in case it needs saying: anybody who was never on the other end of a real interaction with your firm. Not relatives, not a colleague at another firm returning a favor, not a friend who likes you. Google's policy and its filters both cover that, and a firm caught at it loses the honest reviews alongside the rest.

The moment is the resolution, not the invoice

A legal matter runs for months, sometimes years, and there's no counter anybody walks past on the way out. The moment has to be chosen deliberately or it never arrives.

Ask at resolution. The closing, the settlement, the executed documents, the day the case ends. That's when the client feels the outcome and when you are the last thing that worked for them.

The final bill sits on the wrong side of that moment. Whatever a client felt about the result, an invoice reframes the relationship as a transaction, and a review request landing in the same week reads as one more line in the billing process. Where the two fall close together, ask first.

One more piece of timing firms get wrong. In contingency work the relief lands when the money does, and that can be weeks after the case technically resolved, so the calendar entry belongs on the disbursement rather than the verdict.

The attorney asks, and it can't be delegated

In a medical practice the request gets handed over at a checkout desk by somebody with no part in the clinical relationship, and that works fine there.

A firm is built the other way around. The relationship is with the lawyer. A request arriving from a paralegal or a billing coordinator reads as an administrative task and gets ignored accordingly. The same request from the attorney who ran the matter is a personal ask from somebody the client has been speaking to for months, and it converts at a completely different rate.

In practice that means a short personal email at resolution rather than a template blast: two sentences from the attorney, the direct review link, no branding on it. Where volume makes that impossible, a paralegal can draft it as long as the attorney sends it from their own address.

Your reply is a public statement by a lawyer

This section is worth reading twice, because the exposure here is professional rather than commercial.

The American Bar Association addressed it in Formal Opinion 496, issued in 2021. A lawyer may not disclose information relating to a client's representation in response to online criticism. The reasoning is the part that catches people: a negative review, being informal, is not a controversy between the lawyer and the client within the meaning of Rule 1.6(b)(5), so the self-defense exception that would let you answer a formal complaint never opens at all.

The opinion goes further than most lawyers expect. Even a general line saying the events were not accurately portrayed can confirm that you were involved in the events described, and that confirmation is a disclosure on its own. The instinct to set the record straight is precisely the instinct to suppress.

What the opinion leaves open is narrow and entirely usable.

• Ask the platform to remove a post that breaches its own policies.
• Post a reply that discloses nothing and invites the person to contact the firm directly.
• Say that your professional obligations don't permit a response.
• Reach the person offline, which is where any real resolution was always going to happen.

Your own state's rules sit on top of all that and they vary, so check them before you set a policy, the same way you'd check them before running any advertising for the firm.

The one-star from somebody who was never your client

Firms collect these more than most businesses do. An opposing party in a divorce. A relative of a client who lost. Somebody who spoke to reception once and didn't care for the tone.

A review from a person with no genuine experience of your firm breaches Google's policy, and reporting it on that ground is a far stronger position than arguing that it's unfair. Report it, state plainly that it describes no interaction with the firm, and expect the process to be slow and to sometimes fail outright.

Where it does fail, your reply matters more than the review does. A calm, non-disclosing response under a hostile review gets read by every prospective client who scrolls past it, and it tells them more about how you handle conflict than the complaint tells them about your work.

Start by finding out how much of your book is available

Most firms have never separated the matters they can ask from the ones they can't, so the number sitting in the partner's head is the whole book, and the answer comes back as no.

That's the first thing I'd use the free audit for with a firm. I take your practice areas and your current review count against the firms ranking above you, work out which categories are approachable and roughly how many past clients sit inside them, then give you a realistic target and the order to work through it. It comes back inside 24 to 48 hours at no cost. For most firms the number of people they can legitimately ask turns out to be several times what they assumed.

Written by Ashikur Rahman

Founder of Proximity Ranker, with nine years in SEO and a law background that shapes the medical and legal work we do. Meet the founder.

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