Legal, accounting, advisory.
Trust before sale.
Law firms, chartered accountants, consultants, advisory firms. Indian professional-services sites operate under advertising restrictions other sectors don’t have — and the visitor is doing diligence before they call.
On 11 April 2024 the Bar Council of India relaxed its advertising rules for law firms, allowing some forms of website content that had previously been off-limits. Almost no law firm site we audited in the year that followed actually updated. The result is a sector full of websites that read as deliberately under-stated — partner bios with no client names, practice areas described in single nouns, no thought-leadership at all — which paradoxically reads as suspicious to a visitor who’s used to professional sites in other sectors. The fix isn’t to over-correct into marketing copy; it’s to use the new latitude carefully. Specific is better than generic. Verifiable is better than vague.
Can we publish client names on our law firm site now?
With the client’s explicit consent, yes — the 2024 BCI revisions allow for this, though many firms are still being cautious. The safer middle path most of our law firm clients have settled on is naming the industry and rough size of the client (“a Pune-based mid-cap pharma exporter”) without identifying the client itself. This carries most of the credibility signal of a named-client list without inviting any regulatory grey-zone. For chartered accountancy firms the ICAI Code of Ethics is still tighter — names of audit clients should not appear at all, but advisory and transaction work can usually be referenced with consent.
Should our partners have individual bio pages?
Yes, every partner. The bio page is where most of the trust signal lives for professional-services firms — the visitor wants to know who they’d actually work with, what they’ve done, what they’ve published, what they’ve argued. The bios should include: education and Bar Council registration / ICAI membership number (verification gives visitors confidence), areas of practice with specifics, publications and speaking engagements, and a recent photograph. Stock photography or icons in place of partner faces is the largest single trust-deficit signal we audit on professional-services sites.
Half-completed thought: the firms that publish “Insights” or a small blog outperform the ones that don’t on inbound enquiry quality (less browsers, more pre-qualified leads). We don’t have a clean number for this. Saumya thinks it’s a 30% lift, which is what she remembers from a client conversation in February but neither of us can verify it from data.
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