Should AI Describe Your Law Firm or Your Attorneys?

A law firm and its lawyers should be described as two linked things: the firm as an organization with offices, and each lawyer as a person with a license, a bar number and a history that can outlast the firm. When an AI system has to guess which of the two a sentence is about, it tends to blur them, so the firm's pages, profiles and markup should never leave that guess to be made.

Google already separates the person from the practice

Google's Business Profile guidelines list lawyers among "individual practitioners." Their rules, applied to a firm, come down to four points:

A public facing lawyer may have a profile, and it "may include title or degree certification (for example Dr., MD, JD, Esq., CFA)."
Where several practitioners work from one office, "the organization should create a Business Profile for this location, separate from that of the practitioner," and the practitioner's profile name "shouldn't include the name of the organization."
"A practitioner shouldn't have multiple Business Profiles to cover all of their specializations." One lawyer, one profile, however many practice areas.
A lawyer who is the only public facing practitioner at a branded location shares one profile with the firm, named in the form "[brand/company]: [practitioner name]."

A two lawyer immigration practice in Houston can therefore have up to three profiles, one for the office and one for each eligible lawyer, while a solo criminal defense lawyer trading under a firm name is best served by one. Neither should have a profile per practice area.

The firm's name is a regulated statement

Blurring is not only a machine problem. The ABA's comment to Model Rule 7.1 treats firm names and professional designations as communications about a lawyer's services, and says a name is misleading if it implies a connection "with a lawyer not associated with the firm or a predecessor firm." It adds that lawyers "may not imply or hold themselves out as practicing together in one firm when they are not a firm." California's Rule 7.5 comment says "other professional designation" includes "logos, letterheads, URLs, and signature blocks."

So a shared office where two independent lawyers present one brand, or a site whose domain still names a partner who retired, is a compliance question before it is a visibility one.

Markup that keeps the two apart

Schema.org's Attorney type is marked deprecated: "LegalService is more inclusive and less ambiguous." LegalService is "a business that provides legally-oriented services, advice and representation, e.g. law firms." That leaves a clean split: the firm and each office as LegalService, each lawyer as Person with worksFor pointing at the firm and credentials attached to the person.

Keep expectations modest. Google says there is "no special schema.org structured data that you need to add" to appear in its AI features (Google Search Central). Markup is a way to say the same thing the page already says, unambiguously; it is not a way into an answer. More on that in does structured data help AI?

What to do so the firm and its lawyers stay distinct

Give every lawyer one bio page with a stable URL, the name exactly as on the bar record, and a link back to the firm.
Give the firm one page per office that names the lawyers who actually work there.
Match each Business Profile to Google's practitioner rules above before adding anything else.
Do not create a Wikidata item for a firm that does not meet Wikidata's notability policy, which asks for "serious and publicly available references." Most firms do not qualify, and a thin item invites deletion.
Check that no page, profile or domain implies a lawyer who is not with the firm.

The licensing half of each bio is covered in bar numbers and good standing. The wider picture is on the AI visibility for law firms hub.

Not legal or ethics advice. This describes how AI systems can read a law firm in public; your state bar's rules and your own ethics counsel decide what you may publish.

Questions

Should each lawyer at a law firm have their own Google Business Profile?

Google's guidelines name lawyers as individual practitioners who may have their own Business Profile if they are public facing and can be contacted at the verified location during stated hours. Where several practitioners share an office, Google says the organization needs its own separate profile, and the practitioner's profile carries only the person's name, not the firm's.

Which schema.org type should a law firm use?

A law firm should use LegalService, which schema.org defines as a business that provides legally oriented services, advice and representation, such as a law firm. The older Attorney type is marked deprecated because LegalService is more inclusive and less ambiguous. Individual lawyers are better described as Person, linked to the firm.

Should AI describe your firm, your attorneys, or both?