Sam Borrett, founder of Legmark, ran a survey of 1,000 UK adults to find out how people really pick a law firm and what’s important to them when choosing. The results are uncomfortable reading for anyone whose marketing strategy leans on heritage, awards or a sleek brand, and quietly hopeful for everyone else.
I’ve spent over 15 years working in legal sector marketing: in-house in top 200 law firms and as founder of my own agency and consultancy. A lot of my work has involved some version of the same conversation: law firms obsessing over ‘vanity metrics’ while ignoring how their website content and user experience was actually performing.
I wanted some empirical evidence to support our own learned experiences crafting content and messaging for law firms. So we surveyed 1,000 UK adults on how they actually choose a law firm for a personal legal matter – and it pretty much all backed up what we’ve been telling clients for years.
There are two big headlines – and a lot of nuance. First, out of 14 factors influencing the consumer in their selection, “being a well-known national brand” came thirteenth. Behind clarity of fees, behind reviews, behind expertise in the relevant area, behind a personal recommendation. Behind every practical signal you might expect.
What this means for smaller and challenger firms
This is good news if you run a local, regional or mid-sized firm and you’re not interested or able to compete with top 200 firms on TV ad spend. You don’t need to be a household name. What you need to do is make sure you look credible at the moment a potential client is sitting on the sofa with a phone, comparing three websites in 12 minutes.
This means that the marginal return on getting basic things right (fees clear, reviews prominent, a credible bio for the lawyer who’ll actually do the work) is almost certainly higher than another six months of brand-building. Without that foundational content, everything else you do could fall flat once the potential client hits your website.
Spending thousands on a rebrand and the associated navel-gazing, then having a three-paragraph “About our process” page with no actual process in it is, in my experience, a fairly common combination. It needs to stop.
Not only that, but all those credibility points (Google refers to it as EEAT in the SEO world: experience, expertise, authority, trust) will contribute to the perception that AI (LLMs such as Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini etc) will form about your firm – more on that later.
What 55% of people said they want instead
The second headline, and probably one of the most useful findings in the report in my view, is that the highest number of respondents (55%) named a clear step-by-step explanation of the legal process as the biggest trust signal on a firm’s website. Not testimonials, awards, blog posts of new hires, or pictures of partners shaking hands. A clear and plain explanation of what happens, in order, and how long it takes.
At Legmark we talk about copy that ‘holds the hand of the client’ as they read through it. Process explanations are the easiest thing on the list to fix and the thing most websites are worst at.
Open your top three service pages right now. If they jump from a generic introduction straight to a ‘Contact us’ button, with no sequence of stages, no realistic timescales, no plain English description of what instructing you involves, you’re losing enquiries that would have converted on a better-explained page.
The discovery channel to pay attention to
Seventeen per cent of our respondents said they’d use ChatGPT or a similar LLM/generative AI tool to find a law firm for a consumer matter. That’s more than TikTok, YouTube, Reddit and paid social ads combined.
If you’d shown me that figure six months ago, I’d have been sceptical. Today I think it’s one of the most strategically important findings in the report. LLMs recommend firms based on what they can find about them online: independent reviews, mentions in trade publications like this one, the structure and quality of your own website content. If you’re absent from those sources you don’t appear in the recommendation. You’re not even in the consideration set.
The work that used to count as PR, SEO, and content marketing now also feeds AI discovery. They’re not separate disciplines any more. They’re the same problem viewed from different angles.
What’s extra interesting here is that while consumers don’t necessarily consider the size of the brand – or the media coverage it gets – as a key decision-making factor, the LLMs will take all those mentions on board when providing prompt answers to their users.
The takeaway is… there isn’t one
There’s no neat conclusion to this piece. The data isn’t pointing at one thing. What it’s saying is that the consumer making the decision in 2026 is paying attention to a different set of signals than most firms are optimising for. The firms that adjust will be the ones that win this part of the next decade. The ones that keep spending on brand recognition while ignoring the basics on their service pages will keep wondering where their enquiries went.
If your last website project was three years ago and you haven’t looked at it through a sceptical consumer’s eyes since, that’s probably a good place to start.
About the author
Sam Borrett is founder and director of Legmark, a digital marketing and intelligence agency working exclusively with UK law firms. Legmark publishes performance, reputation and AI visibility data on roughly 5,700 UK law firms.
