The challenges we faced expanding The Lawyer Guide beyond Norway
I'm going to walk through the biggest mistake we made growing this company past our first market. It took us far too long to see it clearly, and it's worth writing down properly instead of leaving it as a lesson only the team knows about.
Erling, my co-founder, and I built the first version of The Lawyer Guide in Oslo in 2020. Once Norway started working, we assumed we had found a model we could repeat everywhere else. Buy a new domain, import a lawyer database for the new market, adjust a few lines of text, and launch. Written out like that, it sounds almost insultingly simple, and that should have been the first warning sign.
On paper it made sense. Legal markets across Scandinavia and most of Europe look similar from a distance. The same practice areas come up again and again, and lawyers, legal advisors and jurists are organized into the same three levels almost everywhere. If the structure of a market is the same, you assume the product built for one market works for the next.
That part held up fine. It's the technical layer, and technical layers travel well. What didn't travel was anything that depended on trust, or on how people actually search.
Search has to be rebuilt for every market, not translated
The first place the copy paste model broke was search engine optimization, getting the platform to actually show up when someone looks for a lawyer online. What ranks in Norway doesn't rank in Denmark, and it definitely doesn't rank in Switzerland. Legal terms don't carry across languages the way you'd expect, and the exact phrase someone types when they're looking for a lawyer changes from market to market, sometimes from city to city. You cannot run one search strategy across four countries and four languages and expect it to hold.
We were also doing this before any of the AI tools that exist today were around to help with translation or keyword research. Every term had to be checked by hand, market by market, language by language. It stayed slow for longer than we expected, because there was no shortcut for it at the time.
Norway had a head start we didn't fully understand
We assumed the other markets would pick up the way Norway did, if we just gave them time. We were wrong about why Norway picked up in the first place.
The Norwegian launch got loud in 2021. Magazines covered it, lawyers argued about it publicly, and for the first time people could review a lawyer they had actually worked with. A lot of that reaction was criticism. But the criticism is exactly what built the platform's authority, both with users and with search engines, and it's what made sales in Norway easier from day one, because we already had an audience before we ever picked up the phone.
The other markets got a soft launch instead of a loud one. No controversy, no press wave, no audience already waiting. Traffic came eventually, but much slower, because we had copied the parts of the Norway model that were easy to copy and skipped the part that actually mattered most.
The real cost was accuracy, and lawyers noticed first
The second problem is the one that hurt us most, with the people this business depends on the most: the lawyers themselves.
Every new market needed its own database of lawyers, gathered and checked by hand, one entry at a time, because none of the tools that could speed this up existed yet. That work took weeks per market. We didn't have weeks to spare, because the same small team was also fixing bugs and keeping the rest of the platform running. Multiply that across two or three markets at once, and it's obvious why we couldn't keep every profile current.
When you work with lawyers, a wrong detail on a profile isn't a small inconvenience, it's a credibility problem, and lawyers are right to see it that way. If someone moves their practice, that address needs to be right the next day. If someone loses their license, that needs to show up the next day too. We had no direct connection to any government registry that could tell us that automatically, so we did what we could: updating profiles manually whenever we spoke to a lawyer directly, and running a full pass across the database twice a year. For a platform asking lawyers to trust it with their professional reputation, twice a year isn't close to good enough. A number of lawyers used exactly that gap to question whether we deserved their trust at all, and they weren't wrong to ask.
We're still a small team, and that's not an excuse
Looking back today, I take accountability for not tackling the challenges of this international expansion faster, that’s something we fixed this year. Our small team allows us to be more agile and fix things faster. Our infrastructure is large, but we have perfect control over it.
The team running The Lawyer Guide today is not made of hundreds of people. We maintain the platform, ship new features and fix what’s still broken, across four markets, at the same time. I’m not bringing that up to explain away what went wrong. The small team was part of why the accuracy gap existed, but the actual fix was never going to be a bigger team. We built checks into the platform that don’t depend on someone remembering to run them by hand.
None of this changes why we started the company. The reason is still the one it was in 2020: help people find the right lawyer, and give lawyers real control over how they’re found and represented. What’s changed is how seriously we now treat the difference between launching in a market and actually earning trust in it. We spent our first years treating those as the same job, they aren’t.