AI visibility for law firms

Start with the constraint, because it changes everything downstream and almost no AEO advice accounts for it.

Rule 36 of the Bar Council of India Rules restricts advocates from advertising or soliciting work. A 2008 amendment carved out a narrow permission: furnishing specified factual information on a website: name, address, telephone, email, enrolment details, areas of practice, professional qualifications. Facts. Not claims, not comparisons, not "leading" or "best" or "award-winning".

So when the AI visibility industry tells you to publish thought leadership at volume, build a content engine and aggressively market your expertise, a large part of that is advice you can't take. I'm not your counsel and this isn't legal advice. You know your own regulatory position and the edges here are genuinely contested. But the direction of travel is clear enough to plan around.

Why this is actually a better fit than it sounds

Here's the thing that makes this vertical interesting rather than hopeless.

The mechanism that gets you named by an answer engine is not persuasion. A model isn't moved by your adjectives. It retrieves and assembles facts: who this entity is, where it operates, what it does, whether other sources corroborate that.

Facts are exactly what Rule 36 permits you to publish. The permitted lane and the effective lane are close to the same lane. A law firm that states its practice areas, its enrolment details, its offices and its people, in clean machine-readable form, is doing something both compliant and genuinely effective, while a firm running a promotional content engine takes regulatory risk for signals weaker than it thinks.

What that looks like concretely

• LegalService schema for the firm; Attorney for individual advocates. Both sit under LocalBusiness. Both are pure fact statements: name, address, areaServed, knowsAbout. Not one promotional adjective required.
• Practice areas as text, enumerated. Not a JavaScript accordion, not an infographic. A list, in HTML. "Arbitration, insolvency, commercial disputes" is a fact.
• Your people, with enrolment and qualification. Permitted explicitly. Also the single strongest entity signal a professional services firm has.
• Offices with real addresses, one entry each, properly marked up. "Pan-India presence" is both unmarkable and, arguably, the kind of claim you'd rather not have to defend.

The directory asymmetry

Legal directories will out-appear you in AI answers, and it's worth being unsentimental about why. They publish structured comparable listings across hundreds of firms: the shape a comparison question wants. And they aren't bound by the rules that bind the advocates listed on them. A directory can rank and describe firms in language no advocate could publish about themselves.

That asymmetry is not going to resolve in your favour. Plan for it: you are unlikely to win "best litigation firm in Delhi", and pursuing it is where the regulatory risk lives anyway. What you can own is your own firm's name, your named advocates, and your specific practice areas in your specific jurisdiction. Factual territory, permitted territory, and territory where a directory's breadth is no advantage.

The JavaScript problem applies here too

Law firm sites are fond of the elegant single-page build where practice areas expand on click. According to Vercel's AI crawler study, no major AI crawler executes JavaScript, so if your practice areas only exist after a script runs, the machine-readable version of your firm is a name and a logo.

This is worth checking before anything else, because it's binary. Load your own site with JavaScript disabled. What survives is what an answer engine gets.

Where I'd start

1. Check what survives without JavaScript. If your practice areas vanish, nothing else on this list matters yet.
2. Add LegalService and Attorney schema with permitted factual values only.
3. Put practice areas and people into plain HTML text, with qualifications and enrolment where you're comfortable.
4. Take your own view on Rule 36 before publishing anything that reads as promotional. The lane I'm describing is deliberately the conservative one.

I've scanned a sample of Indian law firm websites but the sample is currently too small to publish a median from without overstating it, so I'm not going to quote you one. When it's large enough to mean something, it'll go up the same way the clinic index did: named, with the method and the raw numbers. In the meantime the Report Card will score your own firm's site in about ten seconds.

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