Schema markup for law firms: what matters and what does not

What schema markup does for an answer engine

An answer engine reading a firm's page has to decide what the firm is, who works there, where it practices, and what each page is about. It can guess from the prose. Markup removes the guessing. A page that states in structured data that this is a LegalService in a named city, with named attorneys, each holding a named bar admission, is an entity the engine can verify against other sources. A page that leaves it to inference is a weaker candidate for the same answer.

Markup does not rank a page or earn a citation on its own. It makes the page legible. The content still has to answer the question.

The four types that matter

• LegalService, on the home page and the location pages. Name, address, telephone, the areas served, and sameAs links to the firm's bar listing, directory profiles, and social profiles. This is the entity record. Consistency with every third-party listing matters more than completeness.
• Attorney, or Person with jobTitle, for each lawyer. Name, the firm as worksFor, the jurisdictions admitted, and a sameAs to the state bar record where the bar provides a stable URL. This is what lets an engine connect a name on the page to a licensed human.
• FAQPage, on any page with real question-and-answer content. Each question and its full answer, matching the visible text exactly. This is the markup engines quote most directly.
• BreadcrumbList, on every page below the home page. It tells the engine where a page sits in the site, which practice area it belongs to, and how to describe the path to it.

What adds little

Article markup on practice pages that are not articles. Speakable markup, which few engines use. Marking every paragraph as a separate entity. Nested markup five levels deep for a page with two facts on it. These consume effort, invite errors, and change nothing an engine does.

Markup that disagrees with the visible page is worse than none. Engines treat a mismatch as a reason to distrust the whole source.

The one type to be careful with

Review and AggregateRating markup on a firm's own site describes reviews the firm collected and chose to display. Several state bars treat self-published testimonials as advertising requiring disclaimers, and some restrict them further. Separately, major search platforms stopped displaying self-serving review markup years ago. The reputational signal engines actually use comes from third-party platforms, and markup on your own page does not transmit it. Leave it off unless your ethics counsel has cleared the specific implementation.

How to check it

Paste a page into Google's Rich Results Test or the schema.org validator. Both show what an engine parses, and both flag the mismatches. Check one page per template, not every page, and check again after any site redesign, which is where markup most often breaks silently.