How people actually find a lawyer, and why none of the tools for it were built for the job

Six years ago I was a junior designer working on the visual identity for a small legal directory in Norway. I didn't know what a bar association was. I didn't know what "regler for god advokatskikk" meant, and I definitely had no plan to end up running the company. I liked the layout work, I liked the logo, I liked figuring out how a directory of several thousand lawyers should actually feel to browse. Somewhere in the years between that first freelance job and today, where The Lawyer Guide runs in Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, and the US, and we're bringing it to Singapore right now, I ended up spending an unreasonable amount of time on one specific question. Not "how do we get more lawyers to sign up." Something further upstream: how does a normal person actually decide which lawyer to trust with their divorce, their dismissal, their parent's estate. Not how a marketing deck says they do it. How they actually do it, at the kitchen table, at 11pm, phone in hand, half convinced they're about to make an expensive mistake.

The answer surprised me at first, then it stopped surprising me and started annoying me. People still find lawyers the old way, through a name someone gave them. That part hasn't moved in decades and probably won't. What changed, and changed completely, is what happens in the ten minutes after that name lands in their head. And that second step, the checking, the verifying, the quiet "is this person actually any good," is where every tool that currently exists for it falls apart. Not because nobody tried building one. Because nobody built it for this specific job.

Why this decision doesn't behave like a normal purchase

Before I get into the tools themselves, it's worth being precise about what kind of decision this actually is, because it doesn't behave like most of what people search for online. Consumer psychology has a name for this category: high involvement purchases. Rare, expensive, hard to reverse, and the buyer genuinely believes the options in front of them are meaningfully different from each other, not interchangeable. Buying a house sits in this category. Choosing a surgeon sits here too. So does hiring a lawyer. Once someone commits, they don't just move on with their life the way they would after buying a coffee machine. They keep looking for proof they chose right, because backing out halfway through a legal matter is expensive, slow, and often makes things worse, and admitting to yourself that you picked badly is its own kind of painful.

Layer onto that the fact that almost nobody in Europe, outside a narrow set of markets, has ever actually seen a lawyer advertise the way a restaurant or a gym does. No billboards. No ads on the metro. No "20% off your first consultation, this week only." That absence isn't an accident, it's regulation, and it's been in place for long enough that most people never even think to question why it's missing. The result is that reputation, built slowly and almost entirely through word of mouth over years, has been close to the only lever a lawyer has ever had to grow. Everything downstream of that fact, how people search, what they trust, what they forgive, what they're willing to gamble on, comes from this one structural detail about the profession.

And there's a second layer that most articles about "legal marketing" skip over entirely, because it's uncomfortable to sit with. Needing a lawyer is rarely a happy occasion. Nobody browses lawyer profiles for fun on a Sunday afternoon the way they browse restaurant menus. It's a divorce, a dismissal, a dispute with a landlord, a death in the family that suddenly involves probate paperwork. People arrive at this decision stressed, often for the first time in their life needing this specific kind of help, with no internal benchmark for what "good" even looks like in a lawyer. So what they're actually optimizing for isn't the objectively best lawyer in the city. It's the path of least resistance to feeling safe about a name they already half have. That single reframe changes what a good tool for this job should even try to do. It shouldn't be a comparison engine trying to surface the theoretical best option out of thousands. It should be a fast, honest way to answer one narrow question: is the person I'm already leaning toward actually trustworthy.

The old way never really left

I want to be careful here, because I don't want to write "people still ask friends for lawyer recommendations" as if I just invented the observation from watching my own family. It's measured, and the numbers are more specific than the general impression suggests. The UK's Solicitors Regulation Authority commissioned YouGov to survey 1,000 people who had used a conveyancer, an employment lawyer, or a family lawyer within the past two years. Only 22% of them used a review site or a price comparison site to actually find their lawyer. For context, close to 90% of that same population uses exactly that kind of tool when buying ordinary goods and services. That's not a small gap. That's an entire category of software, review sites, comparison sites, essentially failing to show up for one specific, high stakes decision, while working fine for everything else in the same person's life.

An earlier UK industry survey from 2019 found the same pattern from a slightly different angle: 61% of people start by asking friends, family, or a colleague, and only 17% end up actually using an internet search to find the lawyer itself. People aren't avoiding research, and it would be wrong to read this as laziness. They're avoiding starting from a blank page. A recommendation from someone they already trust removes the most frightening part of the whole process, which is not knowing who to even put on a shortlist in the first place.

So the first move is still, overwhelmingly, word of mouth. What I think most people building tools in this space have missed, including some very smart people at very well funded companies, is what happens right after that. Once someone has a name sitting on a scrap of paper or in a text from their sister, the very first thing they do is put it into Google. Not to discover a lawyer. To check the one they already have half decided on. That's not browsing behavior. That's verification behavior, and it's a genuinely different job for a piece of software to do well. Most legal tech has been built to solve discovery, help you find someone you don't know yet, when the real, everyday, unglamorous need is verification, help me trust the name I already have.

I'd add one more thing from actually running this business for five years, and I want to flag clearly that this next part is an operator's observation from watching thousands of profiles get reviewed, not a cited academic finding. People are remarkably forgiving of a lawyer who lost their case, as long as the lawyer's reputation for genuinely trying, communicating honestly, and treating them with basic respect stays intact. What actually destroys a lawyer's reputation, in what we see across our markets, isn't losing. It's a client feeling like they were an invoice line item the whole time, or hearing nothing for three weeks during the most stressful month of their life. Outcome and experience are two completely different things, and almost every generic review platform flattens them into the exact same single number. A five star review after a lost case, or a one star review after a technically successful one, both happen constantly, and neither is a mistake by the person leaving it. It's the star rating itself that's too blunt an instrument for what people are actually trying to say.

Why the checking step breaks

This is the part that genuinely gets under my skin, because I've watched it happen to real lawyers on our own markets, not to hypothetical ones sketched out in a slide deck somewhere.

Start with Google, because it's the first place almost everyone lands. A single bad actor, a competitor, an opposing party's lawyer, someone who was never a client at all, can leave a one star review, and the lawyer being reviewed has almost no practical way to get it removed. Google will only take a review down if it clearly breaks a narrow, specific set of rules: spam, harassment, an obvious and provable conflict of interest. Proving one of those applies takes documentation, patience, and often paying a lawyer of your own just to write the removal request in a way Google's process will actually accept. A review that's simply unfair, exaggerated, or written by someone with an axe to grind, but that doesn't technically break a rule, just sits there. Indefinitely. Right next to a reputation someone spent fifteen years building one referral at a time, dragging the average rating down for anyone scrolling past at midnight trying to decide.

Trustpilot is the more "serious" option, the one that positions itself as the trustworthy alternative to the wild west of Google, and it costs real money for that positioning, plans start around $99 a month. But its credibility problem is different from Google's, and honestly more interesting to me than the price tag on its own. In 2026 a short seller called Grizzly Research published a report accusing Trustpilot of creating unsolicited profiles for businesses specifically designed to attract negative reviews, then pressuring those same businesses to pay for the tools needed to manage the resulting damage. The report gave it a nickname that stuck: the "Trustpilot Mafia." Trustpilot denies every part of the allegation. But the fact that a claim like that got real financial press coverage, from a company publicly traded and financially healthy, tells you the perception problem is already loose in the world and isn't going back in the bottle easily. Pieter Levels, an entrepreneur most people in tech circles already know, publicly called the whole business model a "pay to play racket." Whether or not every specific claim in the Grizzly report survives scrutiny, once "money buys your score" becomes the working assumption people carry into a platform, that assumption is extremely hard to undo through a press statement. And for a profession whose entire pitch rests on the idea that reputation cannot be bought, walking into a marketplace where the leading review tool is itself accused of selling reputation is not a minor branding issue. It's close to disqualifying.

LinkedIn doesn't even attempt to solve this problem, and to be fair to LinkedIn, it was never built to. It's a closed network of professionals mostly talking to other professionals in the same industry, which is a genuinely useful thing to be. There's no comparison mechanism built in, no independent signal from an actual client, just a broadcast channel for whatever story a lawyer wants to tell about their own career, their thought leadership, their latest case win they're allowed to talk about. Completely fine for building a professional network. Useless for the one specific question a stressed stranger actually has, which is "should I trust this person with my case."

And a law firm's own website sits at the honest end of the spectrum precisely because nobody expects more from it than they get. It's a business card with a bigger budget. Nobody walks away from reading a well designed business card feeling genuinely reassured about anything, and nobody reasonably should.

The profession doesn't even trust itself here

This is the part of the research that I didn't expect to find, and it might be the single most useful thing in this whole piece, because it proves the tension I'm describing here wasn't invented by us to justify a product. Regulators across Europe have been arguing about exactly this for well over a decade, in real courtrooms, with real, binding rulings, long before anyone in our small team had thought about starting a company.

Take France first. In 2012 a company called Jurisystem launched a site that let the public rate and compare lawyers. The French bar association, the Conseil National des Barreaux, sued them over it, arguing the whole concept broke the profession's strict rules against advertising and unfair comparison. The case eventually reached the Cour de Cassation in 2017, France's highest civil court, which ruled that a genuinely independent third party rating and comparing lawyers is legal, provided it's done in a way that's fair, clear, and transparent. At the exact same time, the French bar's own current guidance still bans a lawyer from putting client testimonials on their own website, on the reasoning that a testimonial chosen by the lawyer themselves is, by definition, one sided, and therefore can't actually inform the public honestly. A neutral third party publishing the same kind of feedback is fine under French rules. The lawyer curating and publishing praise about themselves is not.

I think that line is worth reading twice, because it compresses the entire argument for building something like this into one legal principle handed down by a supreme court. The people who regulate lawyers for a living have already concluded, independently of us, that lawyers grading their own homework is a problem worth banning, and that someone genuinely independent doing the same job is not. That's not a line from our pitch deck. That's a ruling.

Germany took a completely different road, and it's a useful contrast precisely because the underlying behavior is identical, only the regulatory comfort level differs. Rather than fighting the category in court, German legal media mostly normalized it years ago. Anwalt.de, the country's largest lawyer comparison platform, receives roughly 1,500 new reviews a month, according to reporting in Legal Tribune Online, a well established German legal trade publication. Ilona Veth, a board member at anwalt.de, described review platforms in the official journal of the German federal bar association as simply the digital continuation of old fashioned word of mouth, not a threat to the profession's dignity but its natural next form. Same client behavior as in France. Same underlying anxiety about fairness. A completely different institutional comfort level with the solution.

Singapore, from what we can see so far, sits closer to the French instinct than the German one. Under the Legal Profession (Professional Conduct) Rules 2015, rule 46 treats any third party content written about a lawyer as publicity conducted on that lawyer's behalf, which puts real compliance exposure onto the lawyer themselves, not only onto whoever built and hosts the platform. We're still working through exactly what that means in practice for how we operate there, and I'd genuinely rather say that plainly, in public, before we've fully solved it, than pretend it's a done deal.

Somebody already proved the model works

I want to be clear that I'm not describing a gap that only exists on a whiteboard somewhere in Oslo. In the UK, a platform called ReviewSolicitors built almost exactly this: a legal specific review site working directly with SRA registered firms, and it's become the largest platform of its kind in the country. It isn't flawless. Some reviewers on its own Trustpilot page complain about inconsistent moderation, and honestly, I think that complaint proves my earlier point rather than undermining it. Even a legal specific platform built with good intentions has to fight constantly to stay fair to both the lawyer and the person leaving the review, because the two sides genuinely want different things from the same page. But it proves the category itself works. People will use a dedicated tool for this if it earns their trust over time, and lawyers will actually participate in it, willingly, if the process doesn't feel like a coin flip every single time someone opens a laptop.

Germany's anwalt.de proves the same underlying point from a completely different regulatory starting point, at real scale, sustained over years rather than a pilot phase.

And I have my own proof point, and I'm not going to pretend it's a coincidence that it happened on our own platform rather than somewhere else. This year alone, the Norway site crossed 1,000 reviews. What matters to me about that number isn't the raw size, it's what it implies about appetite on both sides of the transaction. Lawyers were willing to be reviewed and openly compared against their peers once the system around it felt fair to them. Clients were willing to sit down and write something as fundamentally unglamorous as a legal services review, which nobody does for fun the way they leave a five star review for a nice dinner, because they wanted that layer of verification for the next person badly enough to bother typing it out. A US based legal directory even put us, a few years back, on a short list of the most interesting legal tech companies coming out of Europe. I'll take that, gladly.

One thing worth admitting honestly, because it's a real lesson from actually doing this rather than reading about it: none of this copies cleanly from one market to the next. What works in Norway doesn't automatically transfer to Denmark, and Denmark doesn't automatically transfer to Switzerland. Legal culture, how people search, what regulators tolerate, even what "verified" is expected to mean to a local audience, all of it is specific to the market, not to the platform. We learned that the expensive way, expanding market by market, and it's exactly why Singapore isn't a copy paste of what we built in Europe. It's a genuine rebuild, using what we learned, for a market that behaves differently in ways we're still mapping out.

What "earned, not bought" actually has to mean

Saying our reviews are more earned than Trustpilot's is a sentence anyone can type in five seconds. I don't think that sentence means anything on its own, and I'd be lying if I said I love writing marketing copy that sounds confident without actually proving anything underneath it. So here's what I actually believe has to be true for a claim like that to survive contact with a genuinely skeptical lawyer, or a genuinely skeptical client who's already been burned once before.

It has to be structurally harder to fake than it is to simply earn honestly. Not impossible, nothing that lives online is truly impossible to fake, but expensive enough in time, effort, and traceability that gaming the system stops being worth it compared to just doing good work and letting the reviews follow naturally. It has to treat a lost case and a badly handled case as two genuinely different things, because collapsing them into one star rating is exactly what pushes good, honest lawyers away from wanting to participate at all. It has to give the lawyer being reviewed a real, fast, human way to flag something that's demonstrably false, without handing them a quiet button that makes inconvenient truths disappear, which is the precise accusation that's been thrown at Trustpilot in public. And it has to be genuinely transparent about how it ranks and surfaces profiles, because a black box ranking system is just Google's problem wearing a different logo.

Those requirements pull in different directions at the same time, and building something that holds all of them at once, for years, across markets with different laws and different cultural comfort with being reviewed at all, is genuinely the hard part of this business. It is not solved by a single reassuring paragraph on a homepage that says the word "verified" in a nice font.

Where this leaves Singapore

So that's the actual bet behind bringing The Lawyer Guide to Singapore after Norway, Denmark, and Switzerland. Earned reputation instead of bought reputation. A space where a lawyer can manage how they show up next to their peers, on their own terms, instead of hoping nothing bad happens on a platform they don't control and structurally can't fix even when something genuinely unfair does happen to them.

I want to be straight about what's still genuinely open here. Singapore's advertising rules for lawyers aren't identical to what we've already navigated across four European markets, and we're adapting the underlying model to fit rather than copying it over wholesale, which is slower work but the only honest way to do it properly. Verification is a genuinely harder problem than it sounds like from the outside looking in, and it's never a finished project you get to check off, it's a standard you either keep raising year over year or slowly let slip without noticing. And plenty of lawyers in Singapore have already been burned by anonymous hate on Google long before we ever showed up with an opinion about how things should be done differently. Rebuilding that kind of trust happens one profile, one honest interaction, one properly resolved complaint at a time. No platform, ours included, fixes any of that just by existing and saying the right things on a landing page.

If you're a lawyer reading this, I'm genuinely curious how you handle your own online presence today, whether you've made a kind of peace with it or you're just quietly hoping nothing happens this month. And if you've had to actually find a lawyer recently, for yourself or for someone you love, I'd like to know where you really looked first, and whether you actually believed what you found once you got there, or just told yourself you did because you needed to move forward.