SRA-compliant websites for solicitors and law firms.

A law firm’s website is not only a shop window. The SRA sets out what it has to publish: your SRA number and the SRA’s clickable digital badge in a prominent place, your complaints procedure, and, if you advertise services such as residential conveyancing, probate or certain employment tribunal work, clear price and service information. Most web designers have never opened the Transparency Rules. They build a smart homepage, leave out the costs page, and paste in a picture of the badge, which the SRA’s own guidance says will not do. Page Forge builds SRA-compliant websites for solicitors and law firms, with the information the rules require built in from the start and written so a client can follow it.

The Transparency Rules are specific. For each listed service you advertise, your website must give the total cost, or where that is not practicable an average cost or range, the basis of your charges, the likely disbursements, whether VAT applies and how much, what the price includes and what it does not, the key stages and likely timescales, and the experience and qualifications of the people doing the work and of their supervisors. It has to be clear, accessible and in a prominent place, not tucked away in a PDF three clicks deep. Your complaints page must explain how and when a client can go to the Legal Ombudsman and to the SRA. Add company law, which expects your registered name, number and office on the site, and a privacy notice for the enquiry form, and there is a fair amount to get right. We build every piece of it in, and we have taken a regulated client’s site through compliance approval before: Clermont Mortgage Solutions, an FCA-regulated mortgage broker whose website was reviewed and approved by its principal firm’s compliance team.

One honest point before you go further: no web designer can promise a site is SRA compliant. The SRA does not certify websites, and responsibility stays with your firm and your compliance officer for legal practice. What we do is put each required item where the rules say it belongs, keep the copy accurate and free of claims you could not stand behind, and make the whole thing simple for your COLP to check. It still has to work as a website: quick on a phone, easy to make a confidential enquiry from, and set up with structured data so search engines understand exactly what you do. A one-page site is £99 to set up and £29 a month, and a firm that needs a page for each practice area is quoted individually. For the wider picture of what a law firm site needs beyond compliance, see our page on websites for solicitors.