Web Hosting for Attorneys

The form that hands you a conflict

Here is the failure, concretely. A prospective client finds you at eleven at night, believes the contact form is private because it says "confidential consultation" at the top of the page, and types out four paragraphs of detail: names, dates, dollar amounts, what their spouse or business partner did. You open it the next morning and read it before you know who anybody is.

You now hold unsolicited confidential information about a matter where the other side may already be your client, or may want to be. That is not a hosting problem and no plan tier fixes it. It is an intake problem that your website created, and the website is where you fix it.

1. Ask for less than you want

   The form should collect a name, a way to reach them, the other parties involved, and one short line about the type of matter. Not the story. Every extra open text box on that form is an invitation to tell you everything.

2. Say what the field is for

   Label the message box in a way that sets a limit. "Briefly, what kind of matter is this?" gets a sentence. "Tell us about your case" gets four paragraphs and a scanned exhibit.

3. Run the conflict check before you read the detail

   Whoever handles intake should be able to look at names and matter type without reading the narrative. If you are solo and there is no whoever, build the habit anyway: check the names first, then read.

4. Decide what happens to a message you cannot take

   Have a standing answer for the ones that arrive already conflicted. Knowing in advance what you delete, what you retain and what you say back is worth more than any wording on the page.

Do not put a document upload button on a public contact form. It converts a casual enquiry into a delivery of case material, and it puts other people's records on a web server for no reason you can defend later.

The form also has to be encrypted in transit, which is the one part of this that genuinely is hosting. Every page that carries a form needs a working certificate, and the browser needs to show it. Our SSL certificates page covers what that involves. It is table stakes, not a feature, and if your site is still serving a form over an unencrypted connection, fix that this week.

Practice area pages, because that is how people search

Nobody searches for a law firm. They search for their problem, in their own words, usually badly spelled and usually at a bad hour. They type what happened to them, not what you call the area of law.

A single page listing eight practice areas as bullet points answers none of those searches. Eight pages, each one about a single kind of problem, written the way the person experiencing it would describe it, answers all of them. That is the whole of what people mean by SEO for a small practice, and it is content work rather than hosting work.

What a page like that actually contains

• The situation, described in ordinary language, so the reader recognises themselves in the first paragraph.
• What normally happens next, in order, including how long it tends to take.
• What you need from them at the first meeting.
• What it is likely to cost, or if you cannot say, how the fee is structured and what makes it go up.
• Who this is not for, and where to go instead.

That last one converts better than anything else on the page. Telling somebody plainly that their matter is not yours and pointing them somewhere useful reads as competence, and the ones who are a fit trust the rest of the page more for it.

Eight real pages beat eighty thin ones. If a page has nothing in it but the practice area name and a paragraph of filler, it is a liability rather than an asset.

Who should not buy this page

If you have staff, this page is aimed at the wrong practice.

Everything above assumes one attorney, or two, reading their own enquiries. The moment there is a paralegal, a shared mailbox that several people open, or a formal intake process with a script, the problem changes shape. It stops being about the wording above a contact form and becomes about who has access to what, who is authorised to run a conflict check, what happens to client documents once they arrive, and how mail is retained. Our hosting for law firms page is written for that situation. The difference is not size for its own sake. It is whether more than one person touches an enquiry before it reaches a lawyer.

Staying on this page, here is what a solo practice does not need to buy.

• A managed plan, for a site that is a dozen static pages and a contact form.
• Extra storage, unless you are storing client documents on the web server, which you should not be doing.
• A security product sold on the strength of the word confidential. If there is no client data on the site, there is nothing there to steal.
• A client portal, until you have a real reason for one. A portal is a place where client documents live, and that raises the stakes on everything.

Where spending more is justified: you take payments on the site, you host a portal or a document exchange, you run a practice management system that has to be reachable from the web, or your site carries genuinely sensitive material. Those are real reasons. Volume of clients is not one, and neither is the seriousness of the work.