Read the General Edition first: → General Edition 3.2 The fact table and the organisation facts page, → General Edition 3.3 Person pages and six-trace alignment, → General Edition 3.4 Third-party credential tiers, Wikidata and the five business profiles. Law firms follow the General Edition's two-hour checklist in 3.1, and the brand six questions and correction timing in 3.5, as they stand (do not change a word of the brand six questions; ask them using only the approved full name — for the three places where law firms fix the wording, see chapter 2, 2.3). The raw answer to question 6 of the brand six questions (comparing you with other firms) names other firms, and is for your eyes only (see chapter 0, 0.4). This chapter covers only where law firms differ from the General Edition.
3.1 The firm's fact table and facts page (/facts): get the approved full name right, and say what you do and don't handle
What you'll do in this section: build the 14-row fact table to the General Edition's blueprint, then make one /facts page. Law firms change eight rows on the general table — name, practice type, practising lawyers, address and scope of practice change how they're written; rows 11–13 are medical-only fields, replaced with the firm's own three rows — and the fee block follows the format in chapter 1, 1.2, checked item by item against the letter of engagement template. Copy the specification in → General Edition 3.2 The fact table and the organisation facts page exactly for everything else.
Hard gate: until the baseline is saved, do not change this page, and do not change any business profile (for freezing the baseline, see chapter 2, 2.3).
| Row | General Edition field | Law firm wording |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Legal name | The approved full name in English, word for word, including capitalisation and the suffix (LLC / Law Corporation / LLP) |
| 3 | Industry licence or registration number | Practice type (law firm / LLP / LLC) + LSRA register lookup link + check date; if the firm has converted, the conversion date |
| 4 | Practitioners | Each lawyer: name as on the practising certificate + link to their own page + LSRA register lookup link; do not write a practising number until it is verified |
| 5 | Address | One line per office: address + postal code + which practice areas that office handles |
| 10 | List of main services | Scope of practice: what you do and don't handle, on the same line |
| 11 | Devices / materials | Changed to "Chinese name": the approved Chinese name, or write "The firm's name is registered in English only." |
| 12 | Insurance / subsidy coverage | Changed to "number of practising lawyers": must match row 4 person for person, with the check date |
| 13 | Follow-up and replacement policy | Changed to "billing method and invoicing": fixed fee, in stages or hourly, and when invoices are issued |
The name row is the hardest of all. A firm renaming itself needs the Director of Legal Services' prior written approval, and the name must not mislead or be easily confused with another firm's [Statute text; see Appendix A.2] (LPA s 132(2), LPE Rules r 6(1)). The name of a law corporation (LLC) must carry the suffix: "Every law corporation must have either the words “Law Corporation” or the acronym “LLC” as part of its name" [Statute text; see Appendix A.2] (LPA s 154(3)) — the fact table, the H1, the name field in schema, business profiles and directory listings must never have the suffix stripped out, in any of them. Pushing "approved name, matched word for word" onto every part of the website and every third-party slot is this book's own reading [Conservative line (not statute text)], 75% confidence. Every page states the firm's name, on the basis of PD 6.2.2 C's sentence "At the very least, the name of the law practice should be stated in the flyer." — the original text is about flyers only, and it uses "should" [Statute text; see Appendix A.3]; pushing it onto every page of the website [Conservative line (not statute text)], 85% confidence.
The Chinese-name field: A firm's name must be stated in English; writing it in Chinese or another official language as well needs the Director of Legal Services' written approval [Statute text; see Appendix A.2] (LPE Rules r 7; for limited liability law partnerships (LLPs) and LLCs, see r 15(1), r 29(1); for the original sentence, see chapter 5, 5.3). Applied to /facts, Chinese-language pages and Chinese-language business profiles: use only the approved Chinese name; where none has been approved, write "The firm's name is registered in English only." — never translate it yourself [Conservative line (not statute text)], 85% confidence. The Chinese-language page itself is optional — build it only if you have Chinese-speaking clients, and accept it against the AI Mode leg only (chapter 5, 5.3); this field on /facts is filled in regardless, even without a Chinese-language page.
State what you don't handle, in the scope of practice: One of the misleading examples the Law Society of Singapore gives for TV advertisements in PD 6.2.1 D is a family-law one — a firm that handles only uncontested divorces, with no expertise or experience in contested divorces, but does not say so, can reasonably be treated as omitting a material fact and being misleading [Statute text; see Appendix A.3]; the original text is about TV advertisements, applied to the website [Conservative line (not statute text)], 85% confidence. So limiters such as "handles only uncontested divorce" or "this office handles only corporate work" go into row 10 and row 5 themselves, on the same line, not in an asterisked footnote (why a footnote doesn't work, see 3.4).
Example: For row 10, write "Family: uncontested divorce, prenuptial agreements, wills. Not handled: contested custody, cross-border divorce." Not "full-service family-law services".
Practice type and conversion date: At the firm level, licensing and name approval sit in LPA s 131(1), s 138 and s 153 (for a law firm, an LLP and an LLC respectively) [Statute text; see Appendix A.2]. For a firm that has converted from a law firm to an LLP or LLC, write the conversion date into row 3: in L3 (2026-09-29), for the "is this firm good" question type, ChatGPT once restated verbatim a conversion date that was on a firm's contact page (single case) — AI will pick up this kind of fact, so wherever you write it, it has to match everywhere.
Practising lawyers and headcount: Write only the name, the link to the lawyer's own page and the LSRA register lookup link. The field names and numbering for LSRA's individual practising details were not checked this round [Original text not obtained]; do not write a field name such as "practising number" until it is verified. The LSRA register lookup page carries its own disclaimer, stating that the Ministry of Law does not warrant the accuracy or completeness of the search results [Statute text; see Appendix A.5] — it is the source for alignment, but your pages must never describe it as "government-certified" [Conservative line (not statute text)].
The fee block: Write it in the format in chapter 1, 1.2 (service tier + defining conditions + billing method + fixed fee or range + what's included and charged separately + payment stages + "The final fee is set out in our letter of engagement."). Law firms can write a range, unlike dental and aesthetics [Original text not obtained]: no prohibition found in the current rules (scope checked: PCR 2015 in full, the Law Society Council's 12 Practice Directions and 2 Guidance Notes, the revoked Publicity Rules; check date: 2026-09-29), 75% confidence. This section adds only one ledger rule: check every fee block item by item against the letter of engagement template, note the template's version number, and never copy an old value off the webpage; every row records its source and the date it was verified, and figures you have only heard second-hand never go on the page.
The right-hand column has three things that stay off even with a sign-off: success rate and win count, with no exception in the original text [Statute text; see Appendix A.1] (PCR r 43(1)(b)(ii)); comparing your fees with other firms' — whether named or identifiable [Statute text; see Appendix A.1] (r 43(1)(c)); and the Law Society's crest [Statute text; see Appendix A.1] (r 42(4)). A single sentence giving a market range with no firm named is, by default, also not written [Conservative line (not statute text)], 85% confidence (see chapter 1, 1.3). A written sign-off resolves only the stop-and-escalate situations; it never turns something banned as Statute text into something publishable (for the stop-and-escalate rule, see chapter 1, 1.1). The basis for the right-hand column's first row — "a shortened name", "a business term as the heading" — is this: a law firm's name must not consist only of an abbreviation or initials (LPE Rules r 9; an abbreviation may appear in a logo), and it must not contain a word describing the business or field of practice (r 10) [Statute text; see Appendix A.2]; the naming rules for LLPs and LLCs contain no such ban on descriptive words. We extend these two rules to website headings, business profiles, and LLPs and LLCs [Conservative line (not statute text)]. "Full-service legal services" and marketing names are inferred from the two paragraphs above [Conservative line (not statute text)]. Review text and star-rating widgets do not go on /facts, per the blueprint; a row reading "platform · number of reviews · rating · check date" [Original text not obtained]: no prohibition found in the current rules (scope checked: PCR 2015 in full, the Law Society Council's 12 Practice Directions and 2 Guidance Notes; check date: 2026-09-29) — write it, if at all, on the reputation and credentials page (chapter 5, 5.21); for the wording, see chapter 1, 1.5.
Two more things the figure doesn't show. An LLP's and an LLC's invoices and official correspondence must carry a limited-liability statement — "every invoice or official correspondence of the limited liability law partnership bears the statement that it is incorporated with limited liability" [Statute text; see Appendix A.2] (LPA s 139(2); for LLCs, see s 154(4)); the original text does not cover web pages, so pushing it onto the /facts footer [Conservative line (not statute text)], 50% confidence — include one line by default, and a firm that would rather not has a partner give written reasons. The name field in the schema template matches the visible H1 word for word, with the suffix, and does not carry aggregateRating (see chapter 2, 2.4).
/facts is still publicity: the PCR's "publicity" includes any form of advertisement retrievable from the Internet [Statute text; see Appendix A.1] (r 2(1)), and every word we publish on the firm's behalf counts as the lawyer's own [Statute text; see Appendix A.1] (r 42(1)). So this page goes through chapter 1's checklist and into this batch's sign-off sheet (Appendix B.4), with no exemptions.
This page type — /facts — is not measured for law firms: in the public dataset's 22 family-law questions (2026-09-23, R1 across both engines plus R2 ChatGPT), the only organisation-level page type cited for law firms was the homepage: 3 of AI Mode's 29 firm citations, all in R1; 1 of ChatGPT's 8 citations across both rounds (R1 and R2), in a near-me question in R2 (entities relabelled against L3's own annotation table; page types roughly labelled by URL). Building it gives 3.4's six-trace alignment an authoritative original — it is not meant to be cited on its own. How to check: fetch the page source with a normal browser UA; the approved full name (with suffix), the LSRA register lookup link and the amounts in the fee block must all be findable, and must match the fact table word for word.
3.2 Lawyer profile pages: name as on the practising certificate, titles from the approved list, expertise backed by evidence
What you'll do in this section: build a person page with its own URL for every lawyer, and fill in the fields to the General Edition's person profile page blueprint; the name follows the practising certificate and the LSRA register lookup, titles are chosen only from the approved list, and every expertise sentence carries an evidence number. This page is not expected to be cited on its own — it is the authoritative original for 3.4's six-trace alignment.
Law firms change the following fields on the blueprint:
- H1 and
title: The name is word for word as on the practising certificate; the description of what the lawyer is comes only from PCR r 33(1)'s approved list (advocate and solicitor, lawyer, and so on) [Statute text; see Appendix A.1]. A person's name that appears in a firm's name must match the wording on their practising certificate [Statute text; see Appendix A.2] (LPE Rules r 8(2)); pushing this rule onto how names are written on lawyer pages [Conservative line (not statute text)]. Write thetitleas<name>, Advocate & Solicitor | <approved firm name>(this wording is not measured). - Registration line: LSRA register lookup link + check date; do not write a practising number or its field name until it is verified [Original text not obtained].
- Qualifications table: Degree + awarding institution + year, and year of admission. Designations are chosen only from the twenty approved by the Law Society Council (PD 3.5.2: Partner, Associate, Consultant, and so on) [Statute text; see Appendix A.3]; the designation Consultant needs 10 years in the aggregate (LPA s 75D), and a foreign lawyer may only be called Foreign Law Consultant, which also needs 10 years (RI Rules r 11) [Statute text; see Appendix A.2]; Senior Counsel is limited to those appointed under LPA s 30 [Statute text; see Appendix A.1, A.2], and the SC list was not obtained this round [Original text not obtained] — verify each person before you write it.
- Third-party credential tiers: Ranking tiers, individual awards and SAL Specialist Accreditation — for the wording, see 3.3.
- Scope of practice and matters: Every "specialise in" / expertise sentence must be backed by evidence against the seven factors in PCR r 43(2) [Statute text; see Appendix A.1]; the evidence number is recorded on the sign-off sheet (Appendix B.4), and the evidence itself does not go on the page; for fees, see chapter 1, 1.2.
- External anchors: The Law Society directory listing (if there is one), the SAL Directory of Specialists (only if accredited), individual profiles in ranking guides, LinkedIn; for Wikidata, use the General Edition's threshold.
title<name>, Advocate & SolicitorThe basis for each row of the figure: Specialist and Expert are not on the approved list as a title [Conservative line (not statute text)], 75% confidence — r 33 governs how lawyers describe themselves in connection with their profession; expertise written in the body text with evidence is separately governed by r 43. "Seasoned" and "authoritative" are treated as expertise claims [Conservative line (not statute text)]: an expertise claim that cannot produce evidence under r 43(2) is deleted [Statute text; see Appendix A.1], and even one that can is rewritten into a checkable fact such as a year or a share of practice [Conservative line (not statute text)]. For the Accredited Specialist and awards rows, see 3.3.
The team page follows the categories PD 6.2.3 A sets for letterheads: a letterhead lists only "(a) partners or directors of the law practice; and (b) consultants, foreign lawyers or legal associates employed by the law practice in accordance with Singapore’s legislative and regulatory requirements." [Statute text; see Appendix A.3] — legal associates are employed lawyers, not paralegals; pushing this onto the team page [Conservative line (not statute text)]. If you list a foreign lawyer not registered in Singapore, copy PD 6.2.3 B's minimum disclosure wording exactly (for the original sentence, see Appendix A.3) [Statute text; see Appendix A.3]. For non-lawyer staff such as marketing and client-service staff: PD 3.5.2 requires that the designation on support staff's business cards "shall be stated in a manner as not to give the impression that he is a legal practitioner." [Statute text; see Appendix A.3], pushed onto the team page and LinkedIn [Conservative line (not statute text)]. A lawyer's business card may print the firm's name, but not a description of the firm's business (PD 6.2.5) [Statute text; see Appendix A.3]; the original text is about business cards only. Whether directory blurbs should also be tightened to match this rule, we hold at only 50% confidence [Conservative line (not statute text)] — the Law Society's own directory listing carries a business blurb the firm wrote itself, so by default write scope of practice per chapter 6, 6.3, holding only to r 43 and r 44; a firm that wants to tighten its wording to match the business-card rule should write it that way.
Why one page per person, yet not expecting this page itself to be cited. Lawyer profile pages themselves have almost no citation samples: of the 18 cited pages the public dataset's family-law R1 (2026-09-23) took apart page by page, 10 were law-firm pages, and a named author appeared on only 2 of them; among L3's (2026-09-29) citation counts for law-firm websites, of those heuristically judged to be lawyer profile pages, ChatGPT's run 1 had 1 of 12 (run 2: 0 of 11), and AI Mode had 1 of 47 — the same page, appearing in the criminal-law "is this firm good" question, where the firm is named after that lawyer (single case). But ask "who's best" or "is this firm good", and ChatGPT points to the lawyer as a person: for the family R1 "who's best" question (1 question), the first row of the recommendation table was one lawyer's name, with the reason being the individual tier a ranking guide gave him (single case); for L3's criminal-law "who's best" question (1 question), both runs listed lawyers one by one by their individual tier in a 2026 ranking guide (single case); for L3's criminal-law "is this firm good" question, both runs read published judgments aggregated by lawyer name in a case-law database (single case). So the main battleground for the individual anchor is third-party directories; the point of the lawyer's own page is to make sure that when a directory, database or listing matches a name to a person, it matches the same spelling.
Representative matters and family law. The blueprint has no "representative matters" field, and the law-firm edition does not add one. If a lawyer insists on listing them: past matters and client names are mentioned only where it does not breach confidentiality and the client has given written authorisation, and success rate is never written at all (chapter 1, 1.4). Family-law matters, and reviews from family-law clients, are published or not case by case, decided by a partner or director's written sign-off; before anything is sent for sign-off, every item first goes through our own de-identification check (the family self-check sheet in Appendix B.4). Two of these rules come straight from the legislation, and no sign-off can release them: nothing that could identify a child involved in the proceedings is ever published (CYPA s 112); nothing covered by a Family Justice Court order restricting publication is ever published (FJA s 10) [Statute text; see Appendix A.4]. Custody and access proceedings within a divorce follow the same CYPA rule [Conservative line (not statute text)], 80% confidence (see chapter 1, 1.7). Both of these rules penalise the person who publishes — CYPA s 112(5)(b)'s own words are "the person who publishes or distributes it" — a lawyer's sign-off only records the lawyer's own judgement; it does not cover our own liability as the publisher (for the four offences that fall on us, see chapter 1, 1.1). A written sign-off resolves only the stop-and-escalate situations; it never turns something banned as Statute text into something publishable.
Pages for lawyers who have left follow the three scenarios in → General Edition 3.3 Person pages and six-trace alignment, keeping the sameAs link that points to the LSRA register lookup. How to check: fetch the page source with a normal browser UA; both the name (word for word as on the practising certificate) and the LSRA register lookup link must be findable; every expertise sentence has a matching r 43(2) factor and evidence number on the sign-off sheet.
3.3 Rankings, awards and specialist accreditation: you can mention them, but only your own entry
What you'll do in this section: peer-reviewed rankings, the Law Society's individual awards, and SAL Specialist Accreditation are the three kinds of third-party credential tier available to law firms. Enter through the guide's normal process; once you're in, write the individual tier on the lawyer's own page only, and the firm tier on /facts, in the form "listed in × guide × year × category × tier" plus a link; do not write about an award you simply pay for. For the mechanism and the three hard rules on wording, follow → General Edition 3.4 Third-party credential tiers, Wikidata and the five business profiles; here we only draw the firm's own decision path.
The sample is 1 family-law question plus 3 from L3. The public dataset's family-law R1 (2026-09-23) "who's best" question (1 question): 4 of ChatGPT's 6 citations were ranking guides (two Doyle's pages, Legal 500, Chambers). L3's (2026-09-29) criminal-law "who's best" question (1 question): both runs listed lawyers by their tier in Doyle's 2026 guide, with 1 of run 1's 2 citations being Doyle's (run 2: 3 of 4 were ranking guides — Doyle's, Legal 500, Best Lawyers); the conveyancing "is this firm good" question (1 question): both runs restated the tier Chambers 2026 gave that firm; the personal-injury "who's best" question (1 question) did not cite a ranking guide — both runs cited a legal news site's list article and the Law Society directory. Treat this only as a direction for the build work, never as a promise. Ranking guides are almost never in Google's top 10: across the family set's 22 questions, Doyle's made Google's top 10 in 0 of them, yet ChatGPT cited it in 2 (same-day Google top-10 archive, aggregate figures only) — SEO ranking can't get you into this slot. This figure is a mechanism observation, not a compliance clearance; what you can actually write is below.
leading only as a tier name, right after the guide name and yearleading with no matching tier nameEntering and citing them: Taking part in these guides' review process [Original text not obtained]: no prohibition found in the current rules (scope checked: PCR 2015 in full, the Law Society Council's 12 Practice Directions and 2 Guidance Notes, the full category 6 list on the Law Society's ethics page; check date: 2026-09-29) — no regulator document deals specifically with guides such as Chambers or Legal 500 (Appendix A.5). Once you're listed, using it as evidence of expertise has a rule behind it: one of the seven factors in r 43(2) is assessment by peers [Statute text; see Appendix A.1].
How to write it: only your own entry — guide name, year, category, tier, link [Conservative line (not statute text)]. Never infer that you're better than other firms from a ranking: r 43(1)(c) bans any comparison or criticism in relation to "the quality of the services provided" by any other lawyer or law practice [Statute text; see Appendix A.1]; "the only firm listed" and "one of only X in Singapore" are also out [Conservative line (not statute text)], 80% confidence. "Leading" appears only as a tier name, immediately after the guide name and year [Conservative line (not statute text)], 70% confidence — PD 6.2.1 D's misleading example is a firm with no family-law expertise or experience calling itself a leading family law practice (Appendix A.3); it is not the word "leading" itself that is banned, so write it only when a matching third-party tier backs it up. Awards you simply pay for, and "best" lists you pay to be on, are by default not written [Conservative line (not statute text)], 70% confidence; to relax this, a partner gives written reasons and approves it case by case. For how to enter an annual ranking run jointly by a newspaper and a statistics firm, see chapter 6, 6.6.
Example: On the lawyer's own page: "<Name> is listed in the "Leading" tier of Doyle's Guide 2026 for Criminal Defence (Singapore)." plus a link; on /facts: "<approved firm name> is ranked in Band <N> for <category> in Chambers Asia-Pacific 2026." plus a link. Add no adjectives, and never follow it with "one of the best".
The Law Society's Practice Excellence Award: This is an award to individual lawyers, first given in 2025, with a Family category. In the Law Society's own words: "Award recipients will receive a commemorative plaque and a special Practice Excellence emblem to showcase in marketing materials." Nomination: "no fees are chargeable for this year’s nomination process." [Statute text; see Appendix A.5]. Write it on the winning lawyer's own page: year + full name of the award + awarding body + category; the firm page writes only "<Name> of our firm received …" [Conservative line (not statute text)]. The award emblem is issued to the individual winner; the Law Society's own crest still never goes on any publicity [Statute text; see Appendix A.1] (r 42(4)) — don't mix the two up.
SAL Specialist Accreditation: "Your accreditation is an individual attainment. It should not be used to promote your firm or organisation." [Statute text; see Appendix A.5] — put it on the lawyer's own page only, never on the firm's homepage. Accreditation is valid for 3 years; once it lapses without reaccreditation, you may no longer market yourself as an accredited specialist (SAL's Marketing Your Accreditation guide, para 4.4) [Statute text; see Appendix A.5]; so write the year of accreditation alongside it, and remove it the moment it lapses without renewal [Conservative line (not statute text)]. For the other three specialisations (construction, maritime, and data and the digital economy), write the full name in the format SAL's guide gives, and copy the official Chinese translation only from para 4.7 of the guide [Statute text; see Appendix A.5].
This row is empty for family lawyers today: as at 2026-09-29 the SAL Directory of Specialists holds 121 entries, 0 of them in family law; applications for Family Law accreditation only opened in July–August 2026, and the first results are due to be announced at the Opening of the Legal Year 2027 [Statute text; see Appendix A.5]. So today no family lawyer can write Accredited Specialist in Family Law. Leave this field blank on family lawyers' pages, and check the directory before every launch; once the first list is out, write only the full title and the year of accreditation — SAL has not yet published post-nominals or an official Chinese translation for family law [Original text not obtained], so do not invent an abbreviation or translate it yourself.
3.4 Six-trace alignment, business profiles and keyword microsites
What you'll do in this section: using the LSRA register lookup as the source, check the name, firm name and office locations word for word in six places, and have a partner or director issue a named correction the same day for anything that doesn't match. Fill in only factual fields on the five business profiles, with the website field pointing to the fees page or that practice area's page. Do not build new microsites named after practice-area keywords; merge any that already exist into the main site, or give every page the approved firm name and link it back. For the general method of alignment, follow → General Edition 3.3 Person pages and six-trace alignment; for the claiming order and the monthly three-state check, follow → General Edition 3.4 Third-party credential tiers, Wikidata and the five business profiles. Here we only pin down the firm's own answers to "who the six traces are", what the profiles can hold, and how to handle microsites.
- 1Register lookup screenshotLSRA individual and firm; screenshot and file it on the spot
- 2Law Society directoryIf there's a listing: name and blurb match the website
- 3SAL directoryOnly checked if accredited
- 4Ranking guidesIndividual and firm profiles; name as on the practising certificate
- 5Website profile pageName as on the practising certificate, linked to LSRA
- 6LinkedInSame spelling for name, firm name and designation
- 7Correct the same dayNamed by a partner or director, sign-off sheet on file
At the firm level, the six traces become: the LSRA firm register lookup, the Law Society directory listing, the firm's profile in ranking guides, the five business profiles, the /facts page on the website, and media coverage. The Law Society's "Find A Featured Lawyer/Law Firm" directory (the Featured directory) is, in the Law Society's own words, a paid advertising slot — "Please note this is not a complete list as the listings are paid by advertising." [Statute text; see Appendix A.5] — only check it where a firm has a listing (whether every listed entry is a paid slot is inferred from this line on the index page; it has not been checked entry by entry). Buying this kind of display-only slot, with no referral or case assignment, off a fixed rate card [Original text not obtained]: no prohibition found in the current rules (scope checked: PCR r 39, GN 6.1.1 paras 33–37, PD 6.1.2, the Law Society's Featured directory page; check date: 2026-09-29), 70% confidence; it is the only paid slot this book suggests considering [Conservative line (not statute text)], 70% confidence — the rate-card terms were not obtained; for whether to buy it, see chapter 6, 6.2. Platforms that refer, assign or match cases for law firms, priced per lead, per completed engagement or by commission, are never used at all [Statute text; see Appendix A.1] (what r 39(2)(b) bans is "commission or other form of consideration"), and a fixed entry fee is not paid either [Conservative line (not statute text)], 80% confidence; third-party rating directories and lawyer directories are only claimed and fact-checked — not a cent is paid until their charging terms are clear (chapter 6, 6.2).
Directory listings are worth aligning word for word because AI treats them as a source of fact: among L3's (2026-09-29) 7 recommendation questions (2 near-me, 2 "is this firm good", 3 "who's best"), ChatGPT's run 1 cited law firms' listing pages on the Law Society directory in 2 of them (run 2: 3), and AI Mode cited them in 2. The blurb each firm wrote for its own listing — which practice areas it handles, which lawyers handle them, how many years each has been practising — was restated item by item. For near-me questions, the office addresses ChatGPT listed were sourced from the firm's contact page, the Law Society directory listing, third-party rating directories, and once from the website of the building the firm's office is in (single case): the answer does not verify the entity, so whichever place has the wrong information, that's the wrong information that gets copied.
Beyond the six traces, there are two more kinds of trace you cannot edit but AI reads anyway: published judgments aggregated by lawyer name in a case-law database, and entries in third-party rating directories (for L3's criminal-law "is this firm good" question, ChatGPT cited both of these in both runs, single case). The first can only be handled by keeping the practising-certificate spelling consistent everywhere, so records get grouped under the same person (not measured, inferred from the mechanism); for the second, send a correction at the timing set out in → General Edition 3.5 The brand six questions, and what to do when you find an error, pointing only to the error, never discussing the rating.
Who sends the correction letter: The duty to correct falls only on the lawyer personally and on the firm's partners and directors, not on employed lawyers [Statute text; see Appendix A.1] (r 42(2)), so the correction letter is signed by a partner or director; applying this duty to an entry a third party wrote itself [Conservative line (not statute text)], 65% confidence. We draft it and send it on the firm's behalf [Original text not obtained]: no prohibition found in the current rules (scope checked: PCR 2015 in full; check date: 2026-09-29), 85% confidence — r 42(1) already assumes someone else publishing on a lawyer's behalf, but every word that goes out still counts as the lawyer's own [Statute text; see Appendix A.1]. Law firms have no equivalent of dental's statutory Letter of appointment for advertising; our own control gate is this batch's sign-off sheet, signed by a partner or director [Conservative line (not statute text)]. With no sign-off sheet on file, not a single correction letter goes out (for the send gate, see chapter 6, 6.1; for the correction letter template, see → General Edition B.3 Outreach emails and review replies, and for the law firm's extra wording, see Appendix B.2).
Why the two columns are kept so strictly apart: every free-text box, business post, Q&A and photo caption on the five profiles is publicity [Statute text; see Appendix A.1] (r 2(1)), using the same word list as the website (Appendix B.3), and photo captions and business posts are the ones most often missed. A win post hits the same success-rate rule [Statute text; see Appendix A.1] (r 43(1)(b)(ii)); case posts are not published, following the General Edition's rule that limits post topics to factual updates; anything about past matters or clients must also not breach confidentiality and must have the client's authorisation [Statute text; see Appendix A.1] (r 43(1)(b)(i), r 6(3)(a); the authorisation must be written and kept on file, see chapter 1, 1.4), with family matters also subject to the two extra rules in 3.2. "Cheaper than other firms" hits r 43(1)(c) [Statute text; see Appendix A.1]; promotional language such as limited-time offers [Conservative line (not statute text)], 60% confidence (chapter 1, 1.2); for the basis of the name and Chinese-name rows, see 3.1. Write office-specific limits into the address row itself, not a footnote: an old draft recorded an office marked "*For Corporate matters only" that was still listed by ChatGPT as the divorce lawyer nearest a particular MRT station (single case; from an old draft's records — the dataset only stores the first 600 characters of an answer, so this can't be rechecked). The only field on the Google Business Profile with real leverage is the website field, so it must point to the page that can actually serve this buyer, and you must check the canonical domain (the www and https forms must be consistent).
Review replies on the profiles follow the wording in chapter 1, 1.5 and the template in Appendix B.2: never confirm that someone is the firm's client, never discuss the matter, never comment on the opposing party. For reviews from family-law clients, every reply is signed off in writing by a partner or director, and goes through our own de-identification check before it is sent for sign-off; if a reviewer names their child or the child's school themselves, the reply does not repeat it either — anything that could identify a child involved in the proceedings, or anything covered by an order restricting publication, cannot appear in the reply even with a sign-off [Statute text; see Appendix A.4] (CYPA s 112, FJA s 10); we are the ones sending the reply, and a sign-off does not take on our own liability as the publisher.
Keyword microsites
Why not build a new one: mechanically, this fragments the entity — the same firm appearing under two or three domains and two or three headings means none of them is strong enough when AI matches names to people (for the mechanism, follow the R5 passage in → General Edition 8.9 Cross-border: whose law applies). The data doesn't support it either: of law-firm citations, the share coming from this kind of microsite is 5/70 in L3 (2026-09-29, across the three calls) and 6/37 in the public dataset's family-law questions (R1 across both engines plus R2, 2026-09-23, relabelled against L3's own annotation table); one divorce-keyword microsite made Google's top 10 in 15 of the family set's 22 questions, yet ChatGPT cited it 0 times, and AI Mode gave it 1 citation in 12 questions (same-day Google top-10 archive, aggregate figures only).
Three compliance points: a microsite page with no approved firm name on it is unverifiable publicity — PD 6.2.2 C judges a flyer that writes only "Legal Services" plus a phone number to be misleading [Statute text; see Appendix A.3], applied to microsites [Conservative line (not statute text)], 85% confidence; a domain containing best or top is a self-awarded ranking [Conservative line (not statute text)], 80% confidence; using a business term as the firm name in the heading amounts to inventing an unapproved name — a law firm's name itself must not contain a word describing the business or field of practice (LPE Rules r 10, see 3.1) [Statute text; see Appendix A.2], applied to microsite headings [Conservative line (not statute text)]. For microsites you keep, check robots, the WAF and nosnippet domain by domain (chapter 2, 2.4), and put the approved full name at the top of every page, linked back to the main site's /facts.
