Large-firm work is bought through a mix of referral, reputation, and panel selection, and search sits inside that process rather than replacing it. General counsel shortlists a handful of firms from relationships and directories, then researches, and that research is where the site matters: the practice group page, the attorney bio, the representative matters, the published thinking on the specific statute or regulation in play. The search rarely reads like hiring intent. It reads like a question about a rule, asked by someone who is already evaluating you.
The unit of authority is the practice group, not the firm. Corporate, M and A, litigation, employment, real estate, and intellectual property attract different searchers with different vocabularies, and each competes against a different set of firms. Employment content fights a crowded field of firms publishing on every new agency rule; a specialized transactional group may compete with only a few peers nationally. Treating those as one program produces a homepage that ranks for the firm name and practice pages that rank for nothing.
Attorney bios do more work in this vertical than in almost any other. They are the most-visited pages after the homepage, they are what a recruit reads, they are what a journalist checks, and they frequently outrank the practice pages for a named specialty. Add the reality of a multi-office footprint, where each market has its own bar, its own referral network, and its own competitive set, and the honest structure is a set of coordinated per-market local programs plus deep practice content, not a single national push.
