Be the firm Washington clients find.
Washington, DC is a sophisticated market where clients expect a firm's digital presence to match the seriousness of the work. Polish and substance both matter here.
What we do for Washington firms.
Answer Engine Optimization in Washington
When a prospective client asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI for a lawyer, your firm should be the name it returns.Detail →02SEO & Local Search in Washington
When someone searches for a lawyer, the firms in the local pack get the calls. We build the foundations that put yours there.Detail →03Content & Authority in Washington
Practice-area writing and thought leadership that reads like counsel, the fuel that ranks you and gets you cited.Detail →04Website Design & Development in Washington
The foundation it all runs on: a fast, legal-specific site built for search, answer engines, and the way firms win clients.Detail →Regulatory and administrative practice, government contracts, appellate work, and international trade. The most policy-facing legal market in the country.
Washington is unusual because much of the work is not sourced locally at all. Clients are national or international and are searching for subject-matter authority in a regulatory area rather than for a lawyer in a place. That inverts the usual priority: for DC firms, question-led authority content on specific regulatory topics matters more than city-level terms, and it is also exactly the content answer engines cite.
The sources that count in Washington.
Off-site authority is the hardest part of legal search to earn and the most durable once earned. These are the institutions that carry weight in this market, and the places we work to have a firm properly represented.
Bar associations
- District of Columbia BarA unified bar: membership is mandatory to practice here, and the directory is authoritative.
Courts
- U.S. District Court for the District of ColumbiaThe federal trial court for most challenges to federal agency action.
- District of Columbia CourtsThe local trial and appellate court system.
Everything we publish for a District of Columbia firm is written against the District of Columbia Rules of Professional Conduct, rule 7.1, administered by District of Columbia Bar. Those rules govern what a firm may claim about results, how testimonials and reviews may be used, and whether a lawyer may be described as a specialist. We are not your ethics counsel and final review belongs with you, but we build to them rather than discovering them after publication.
A partner that understands the Washington market.
Built with District of Columbia bar advertising rules in mind, informed by the District of Columbia Bar.
Legal search is competitive and regulated
Legal is one of the most contested markets in search, and it is bound by ABA Model Rule 7.1 and state bar advertising rules. We build visibility that performs and stays compliant.
Clients search for problems, not services
People look for a specific issue in a specific place, and they ask AI the same way. Your search and content have to match how clients actually phrase their problem.
Authority has to be earned, not claimed
Both Google and the answer engines reward genuine, substantiated authority: real expertise, clean structure, honest signals. There is no shortcut, and the shortcuts get penalized.
We have specialized in legal for ten years
We understand these problems because we have run search and content for more than forty law firms as WhatArmy over the last ten years, not because we read about it.