What Belongs on an Attorney Bio Page: 12 Bios, Measured
The short answer
An attorney bio page that ranks runs about 1,150 words across roughly 11 headings. Nearly every one names the law school and the bar admissions.
Almost none answer the questions that decide the phone call. One in six names a single case result, one in four lists the languages the lawyer speaks, and not one cites a court, a statute or any outside source.
None of them is easy to read. The median score is about 47 on the Flesch scale, where plain English sits between 60 and 70.
A visitor on your bio page has already decided they need a lawyer, and now they are deciding whether it should be you. That is a different question from the one law firm practice area pages answer, so it needs a different page.
What follows is what the bio pages of twelve working attorneys contain, measured across five firms. The gap between what they cover and what a worried stranger wants to know is wide.
The shape of a bio page
Start with the dimensions, because they settle the brief before anyone writes a word.
| Measure | Shortest | Typical | Longest |
|---|---|---|---|
| Words of body copy | 455 | 1,155 | 3,035 |
| Headings (H2 and H3) | 1 | 11 | 18 |
| Share of headings that are questions | 0% | 10% | 20% |
| Calls to action per 1,000 words | 0.0 | 1.4 | 7.0 |
| Internal links | 29 | 146 | 224 |
Eleven headings across 1,155 words is a heading every hundred words. That shape is not a résumé laid out in paragraphs. It is a page split into parts a reader can skim, so someone hunting for one fact can find it and stop.
Two numbers in that table are low enough to matter. Nearly half the bios carry no question heading anywhere, and nearly half have no call to action at all. A reader who finishes the page convinced still has to work out what to do next.
The questions a bio answers, and the ones it skips
Here is where the pages agree, and where they go quiet.
| Does the bio address it? | Bios (of 12) |
|---|---|
| Law school named | 11 |
| Bar admissions | 9 |
| Year admitted, or years of experience | 9 |
| Direct contact on the page | 8 |
| Practice focus named | 7 |
| Something human about them | 7 |
| Awards or recognition | 4 |
| Publications, speaking or teaching | 3 |
| Languages spoken | 3 |
| A case result or representative matter | 2 |
Read that list top to bottom and the pattern is hard to miss. Every page covers the credentials, and almost none answer the questions a visitor is deciding on.
Where someone went to law school is a fact about 1998, while what they have done for a client in trouble is a fact about this year. Only one bio in six offers the second kind, and that one detail does more work than the whole credential list above it.
Languages are the sharpest miss of all. A visitor whose first language is not English wants one specific thing, and a bio naming it wins that call outright, and few bios manage it.
Direct contact is worth checking today. A third of these bios send the reader back to a central contact form, with no phone number or email anywhere on the page. The visitor already chose a person, so routing them to a general inbox asks them to start over.
Four bios, one name changed
One firm in the five publishes a bio page for each attorney that is, word for word, the same page. Four lawyers, four URLs, and the only text that changes between them is the name at the top.
The body is the firm’s wall of client testimonials, telling other people’s stories, so there is no biography on the page at all.
That is the honest end point of treating a bio as a box to fill. If a reader cannot learn one specific thing about the person, the page is not doing the job its URL promises.
Written for a colleague, read by a stranger
Not one of the twelve bios scores 60 or better for reading ease. The best manages 50.6, the median sits near 47, and the hardest is down at 21.
Be careful what you conclude, because these pages rank while being hard to read. A plain-English rewrite is not a ranking tactic.
What it does say is that ranking and persuading are separate jobs. A reader on a bio page is nervous and looking for reassurance, and long sentences in formal phrasing read as distance. That is the opposite of what the page exists to do.
Google’s own guidance asks whether a page “presents information in a way that makes you want to trust it.” It is blunt about the priority too: of experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust, “trust is most important.” The same guidance asks whether bylines “lead to further information about the author or authors involved.” A bio page is what answers that for all the other law firm website pages.
Two markup mistakes worth checking
Every firm in the sample ships structured data on its bio pages, and none had zero. Two choices in it are wrong, and each shows up as one firm’s template repeated across its attorneys.
Use Person, not Attorney. The Attorney type looks purpose-built, and it is not. In schema.org it sits under Thing > Organization > LocalBusiness > LegalService > Attorney, which makes it a business type rather than a person type. Its own page carries the notice: “This type is deprecated – LegalService is more inclusive and less ambiguous.” A lawyer is a person, so Person is the right markup, and four of the five firms already get this right.
Do not mark up your own star rating. One firm carries AggregateRating on its bio pages, paired with Organization, and Google’s rule names that exact case. Where the reviewed entity “controls the reviews about itself,” pages using “LocalBusiness or any other type of Organization structured data are ineligible for star review feature.” Breach it and “Google may take manual action against it,” after which “the structured data on the page will be ignored” — all of it, not only the rating.
Why “specializing in” is a regulated phrase
Seven of the twelve bios name a practice focus, which helps the reader and which the rules allow, but the wording is where the risk sits.
State rules draw a line between describing your practice and claiming certification. A lawyer “may communicate the fact that the lawyer does or does not practice in particular fields of law.” A claim of certification is narrower, and it carries two conditions.
The rule is explicit: a lawyer “shall not state or imply that a lawyer is certified as a specialist in a particular field of law” unless two things hold. An approved or accredited body must have certified them, and “the name of the certifying organization” must be “clearly identified in the communication.” Naming the certifier is therefore not decoration; that condition is what makes the claim allowable.
One trap for anyone looking this up: the rule number differs by state. The American Bar Association rewrote its advertising rules in 2018 and folded this provision into Rule 7.2(c), while states that kept the older numbering still carry it at Rule 7.4. Check the rule your own bar publishes rather than a number found online.
What to put on the page
The measurement points at a short list, and most of it is cheap to fix.
- One case you can describe. Not a settlement table, which carries its own rules, but one matter: what was at stake and how it ended. Five bios in six skip this.
- A phone number or email on the page. The reader chose a person, so let them reach that person.
- Languages, if any apply. It costs a line and it decides calls.
- Headings a reader can skim. About one per hundred words, with some of them phrased as the question a visitor is actually asking.
- One human detail. Five bios in twelve have none, and it is what separates a person from a credential list.
- A source when a claim invites one. No bio in the sample cites a court, statute or outside body, so a single real citation becomes a point of difference.
Personmarkup, with the bio linked from the pages that person writes.
Common questions
How long should an attorney bio be?
About 1,150 words matches what currently ranks, with roughly 11 headings. Length is not really the point, though: a 455-word bio in the sample does its job, while a 3,035-word one buries the useful parts.
Should every attorney get their own page?
Yes, and it should be their own page in substance rather than only in its URL. One firm here serves four attorneys the same text with the name swapped, which is a directory listing wearing a bio’s address.
Can a bio say the lawyer specializes in something?
State rules let a bio describe the field it works in. A claim of certification as a specialist is narrower: an approved or accredited body must have certified the lawyer, and the bio must name that body. The provision sits at 7.2(c) or 7.4 depending on the state.
Is it safe to show the firm’s review stars on a bio?
Marking up your own rating is the problem, not displaying reviews. Where the entity controls reviews about itself, Google treats Organization and LocalBusiness markup as ineligible, and a manual action causes every bit of the page’s structured data to be ignored.
Does a bio page need its own structured data?
Every firm measured ships some, and Person is the right type for a human being. The Attorney type is deprecated and sits under business types in schema.org, so it is the wrong choice despite the name.
What to take away
- A bio that ranks runs about 1,150 words over roughly 11 headings — a heading every hundred words.
- Credentials are covered everywhere, so case results, languages and direct contact are the gaps, and they are what a visitor decides on.
- These pages rank at a reading ease near 47, which makes plain English a conversion choice rather than a ranking one.
- Mark the lawyer up as
Person, because theAttorneytype is a deprecated business type. - Leave your own star rating out of the markup, and name the certifier whenever the page claims a specialty.
Sources
- schema.org: Attorney — deprecation notice and type hierarchy
- schema.org: Person
- schema.org: LegalService
- Google: Review snippet — self-serving reviews
- Google: helpful, people-first content
- Google: structured data policies
- Kansas Rule 7.4 — specialization text
- ABA Model Rule 7.2
- ABA 2018 advertising changes
- ABA Model Rules
- Google: supported features
Twelve attorney bio pages measured across five firms on 20 October 2026. Collection found 23 candidate pages. Six failed the person-name check on the main heading, two rendered in JavaScript, and three repeated another bio almost word for word. Exact medians: words 1,155, headings 11, question headings 10.1%, calls to action 1.4 per thousand words, internal links 146, Flesch 47.35. This audit counts structured data and other template choices per firm, because a count of four pages is often one template repeated four times. Reading ease uses the same calculation applied to the articles on this site.
Last reviewed October 20, 2026 · How this is researched · Report a correction
AttorneyPlot designs and builds websites for law firms, so it has a commercial interest in this subject. Nothing here is legal advice and nothing here creates an attorney-client relationship; complying with the advertising rules of your own jurisdiction remains your firm's responsibility. No ranking, lead volume or case outcome is guaranteed anywhere on this site.
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