Digital PR that puts your solicitors in the legal press

If you buy links

Paid link placements are still the most commonly sold form of "authority building", usually described as guest posting or content partnerships. They breach Google's guidelines, they carry a manual action risk, and for a regulated firm they create a further problem: the sites selling them are frequently low-quality and your firm's name ends up alongside content you would not want a client to associate with you.

They also do nothing for AI visibility. Models weighing which firm to name lean on sources they treat as credible: established trade and national press, sector directories, review platforms with volume and recency. A paid placement on an unrelated blog is not in that set, so you pay for a link that moves neither channel.

What to do instead: earn coverage. It is slower, it is harder to forecast, and it is the only version of this that compounds rather than needing topping up.

If you outsource commentary to a writer

The commercial appeal is obvious: a partner's time is expensive and a journalist wants a quote by four o'clock. So an agency writes something plausible and attributes it.

What happens: it reads like it was written by someone who has not done the work. Legal journalists notice, and they stop coming back. The relationship that makes reactive commentary valuable, being the person a reporter calls, is precisely what generic quotes destroy.

What to do instead: we handle the monitoring, the pitch, the deadline management and the drafting scaffold, and your solicitor supplies the actual view. Usually five to ten minutes on a call, which we turn into the quote. The expertise has to be genuine because the audience is expert.

If you pitch a press release

Firm news, a new hire, an office move, an award shortlisting: these are announcements, and journalists do not need them. A press release about your firm's own activity has no reason to be published unless the firm is large enough for its movements to be news.

What to do instead: give the journalist something they cannot get elsewhere. Two things reliably work. Reactive expertise on a story already running, delivered fast, where you are solving their deadline problem rather than asking them to solve your visibility problem. And original data, which is the strongest asset available to a specialist firm because it creates the story rather than commenting on someone else's.

If you ignore the directories

Legal directory listings are unglamorous and firms deprioritise them, which is a mistake for a reason that has changed recently.

Directories are among the sources AI models lean on most heavily when deciding which firms to name, because they are structured, they are sector-specific and they corroborate. The SRA register, the Law Society's Find a Solicitor, Chambers, the Legal 500, ReviewSolicitors: a firm absent or inconsistent across these has given the models very little to work with, however good its own website is.

What to do instead: treat citation consistency as ongoing maintenance rather than a one-off task. Details drift, former trading names persist after mergers, and directories update from stale sources. A profile that was clean two years ago frequently is not now.

If you measure it on links alone

A link count tells you what was placed, not what it did. It also encourages exactly the low-quality volume that does not work.

What to do instead: report coverage, referring domains gained, whether the mention was named and linked or named only, and whether the source subsequently appears in AI citations for your sector's prompts. That last measure is the newest and the most useful, because an unlinked mention on a source models trust can be worth more for AI visibility than a followed link on one they do not.

What a defensible programme looks like

Monitoring for stories where your solicitors have a genuine view, and moving fast when one appears. One or two named solicitors built up as go-to sources rather than the firm as an anonymous entity, because journalists cite people and models resolve individuals as entities. Original research where you hold data nobody else does. Directory and citation hygiene maintained monthly. And coverage reported alongside referring domains and AI citation share.

It is slower than buying links and the results do not disappear when the invoice stops.