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Solicitor directory development

For directory operators, professional bodies and referral networks who need a searchable directory of solicitors and firms with claimed profiles, structured taxonomies, forwarded enquiries and moderated reviews, built around their own data and commercial model.

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The problem

What goes wrong today

Where it usually starts

A directory usually begins as a spreadsheet of firms exported from somewhere and published as a list.

  • Areas of law are free text, so "employment law", "Employment" and "HR disputes" are three different filters.
  • Offices are a single address field, so a firm with four branches appears once in the wrong town.
  • Firms email the operator to correct a phone number and the change is made a fortnight later by hand.
  • Nobody knows which profiles are maintained by the firm and which were scraped years ago.

Where it gets harder

Enquiries from the public go through a form that emails the firm and copies nobody, so the operator cannot tell a firm how many leads it received or prove that a sponsored placement produced anything.

  • Reviews arrive by email and are pasted in, unmoderated, with no link to the person who left them.
  • When a professional body wants to show only accredited members, the accreditation data is a column somebody updates annually.
  • The directory looks complete and is quietly wrong in hundreds of places.

Scope of the service

What the build covers

A custom directory build normally covers:

  • Structured profiles For firms and individual solicitors with areas of law, accreditations, languages, offices and a free-text fee basis
  • A claim-your-profile flow With verification against the firm's domain or a document the operator accepts
  • Faceted search by area of law Location and accreditation with the taxonomies maintained by the operator rather than free text
  • Enquiry forwarding to the solicitor With each enquiry tracked from submission to the firm's response
  • Sponsored placements and featured profiles With an order and invoice behind each
  • Client reviews With moderation and a link to the enquiry that produced them
  • Bulk import of firms from a spreadsheet with duplicate detection
  • Data-accuracy prompts sent to profile owners when a profile has not been confirmed for a period the operator sets

We start with the operator's existing data: how it was gathered, which fields are trustworthy, and what the taxonomies should be. Then we walk the lifecycle of one profile: import or create, claim and verify, enrich, searched, enquiry forwarded, review. Those become the named stages of the scope document.

Deliberately out of scope

  • Giving legal advice, matching the public to a solicitor by algorithmic recommendation, and running the firms' own matters

When the scope grows

Scoping scenario

A professional body with nine thousand members wants a public directory where only members in good standing appear, with accreditation badges driven nightly from its membership database, profiles claimed by members through the body's existing login, and enquiries forwarded with a monthly statement per member. The membership-driven visibility and single sign-on are what make it a custom build.

Deliverables

What you receive

  • Discovery notes assessing the existing dataset and defining the taxonomies
  • A scope document naming each profile stage, the verification and moderation rules and what is out of scope
  • Design of the search results, the profile page and the owner's dashboard on mobile and desktop
  • The build, deployed to your hosting or ours, with the import tool and duplicate detection ready before launch
  • Import of the existing dataset with a reconciliation report of what was merged, skipped or flagged
  • Training for the directory administrator and moderators, with a written guide
  • Handover material and full ownership of the source code and your data

Process

How a project runs

Each stage maps onto the project view in your client panel. Durations are set in your proposal, never on this page.

  1. Onboarding

    Access to the current dataset, any membership database, the existing site and the operator's commercial terms for placements.

    Project stage: Onboarding

  2. Planning

    Sessions with the operator to settle taxonomies, verification rules, placement types and moderation policy; scope document agreed.

    Project stage: Planning

  3. Design

    Clickable designs of search, the profile page and the owner dashboard, tested with a solicitor who has never seen the directory.

    Project stage: Design

  4. Development

    Built in stages: taxonomies and import first, then profiles and claiming, then search and enquiries, then placements and reviews.

    Project stage: Development

  5. Client review

    The operator imports the real dataset into a review environment, checks the reconciliation report and runs searches against known firms.

    Project stage: Client review

  6. Revisions

    Import rules, taxonomy mappings and search weightings from the review are adjusted and re-checked against the scope document.

    Project stage: Revisions

  7. Ready for launch

    Final import, redirects from old profile URLs, claim invitations tested, placement invoicing checked on sample orders.

    Project stage: Ready for launch

  8. Delivered

    The directory is public and claim invitations go out; optional maintenance and hosting continue under their own agreement.

    Project stage: Delivered

Integrations

Commonly integrated

Systems this kind of business usually asks us to connect. Each integration is confirmed during discovery; none is assumed.

  • Membership databases that decide who appears and what badges they carry
  • Single sign-on so members claim profiles with an account they already hold
  • Card payment and invoicing providers for placements and featured profiles
  • Email providers for enquiry forwarding, claim invitations and accuracy prompts
  • Mapping services for office locations and distance search
  • Analytics with consent handling so placement performance can be reported to buyers

How we would approach it

Worked example

Concept demo

A professional body directory driven by membership status

In this scoping scenario, a professional body with nine thousand members wanted a public directory in which only members in good standing appeared, with accreditation badges refreshed nightly from its membership database and profiles claimed through the body's existing login. The scope we would propose: a nightly synchronisation that creates, hides or re-shows profiles according to membership status, badge rules mapped from accreditation codes, single sign-on for claiming and editing, enquiry forwarding with a monthly statement per member, and a moderation queue for reviews that links each review to a forwarded enquiry.

The reason this needs a custom build is the synchronisation: the directory is not the source of truth for who appears, the membership system is, and a packaged directory assumes the opposite.

Concept demo: a scoping scenario written to show how we would approach the work. It is not a delivered client project.

Pricing

What affects the price

Every proposal is priced on scope. These are the factors that move it most for this kind of build.

  • Size and condition of the starting dataset and how much reconciliation it needs
  • Taxonomies: areas of law, accreditations, languages and how they are maintained
  • Claim and verification method, including single sign-on against an existing system
  • Whether visibility is driven by an external membership database
  • Placements, featured profiles and the invoicing behind them
  • Reviews, their moderation policy and the link to enquiries
  • Enquiry forwarding and the reporting owed to profile owners
  • Hosting choice: your own hosting or ours

Start from a package

Solicitor directory package

Structured firm and solicitor profiles, claim and verify, faceted search, forwarded enquiries, placements and moderated reviews for directory operators.

Custom build
View the package

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

How do you decide between a custom build and the package?

During discovery we compare your dataset, commercial model and verification rules against the solicitor directory package. An operator building from a spreadsheet with standard taxonomies is usually a package fit; visibility driven by a membership system, single sign-on or bespoke placement commercials point towards a custom build, and we say which.

Can you import our existing list of firms?

Yes. The import tool maps your columns to the structured profile, detects duplicates by name, address and domain, and produces a reconciliation report showing what was merged, skipped or flagged for a person to decide. Free-text areas of law are mapped to your taxonomy with the unmatched ones listed.

How is a profile claim verified?

The operator chooses the rule: an email at the firm's domain, a document uploaded for a moderator to check, or an account in a membership system. The verification method and who approved it are recorded on the profile.

Does the directory recommend a solicitor to the public?

No. Search returns profiles matching the facets the searcher chose, ordered by rules the operator sets and with sponsored placements labelled as such. The build does not rank solicitors by quality or recommend one over another.

Who owns the directory afterwards?

The operator does. Source code and the dataset are handed over at delivery; hosting and maintenance are optional, separately agreed and movable to another provider.

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