Case results are one of the most powerful trust signals a law firm can put on the internet — and one of the most legally radioactive. Most firms handle them in one of two ways. Either they refuse to publish any results at all, because their last marketing person scared them about the ethics rules. Or they publish a wall of “$2.4M settlement” tiles with no context, no disclaimers, no schema, and no real path from the result back to a practice page that converts. Both approaches leave cases on the table. This page is the middle path — how to display results in a way that ranks, converts, and doesn’t get you a letter from the bar.
I’m going to be direct about what I think most agencies miss: case result pages are practice pages with proof attached. They’re not a separate marketing object. They’re not a portfolio. They’re not a brag wall. They’re the place where a stressed person on a phone, three minutes into your site, finally sees evidence that you’ve actually handled the thing that just happened to them. Treated that way — as a conversion asset wired into the practice page system — they’re worth real money. Treated as a checkbox, they’re either dead weight or a malpractice risk. For the bigger picture on practice pages, see the practice pages guide and our piece on the anatomy of a ranking practice page.
The ABA rule that governs everything else
ABA Model Rule 7.1 is the single rule that touches almost every word you’ll put on a case result page. The text is short: “A lawyer shall not make a false or misleading communication about the lawyer or the lawyer’s services.” The comments are where it gets specific. A communication is misleading if it omits a fact necessary to make the statement not materially misleading. A communication is misleading if it creates an “unjustified expectation” about results the lawyer can achieve. A truthful statement is still misleading if there’s a substantial likelihood it will lead a reasonable person to form a specific conclusion about the lawyer’s services for which there is no reasonable factual foundation.
That last clause is the one that hangs over every case result page. A $2.4M settlement is true. Posting it on a page without context — without the case type, the injuries, the jurisdiction, the disclaimer that other cases will produce different results — creates the unjustified expectation that anyone walking in the door will get a similar outcome. The result is still true. The communication is still misleading. The bar can still come knocking.
Every state has adopted some version of Rule 7.1. Most have added their own variants — and the variants matter. New York’s DR 2-101 and its successor rules require specific disclaimer language for results-based advertising. Florida’s Rule 4-7.13 explicitly addresses past results and requires disclaimers. California’s Rule 7.1 has its own gloss. Texas has detailed comments on “no comparison” claims. If you operate in more than one state, you need to know each state’s variant — generic federal-level advice will get you sideways with the strictest state your firm touches.
The most expensive ethics violations I’ve seen at firms didn’t come from the substance of the marketing. They came from someone publishing a page without showing it to the firm’s compliance person first.
The disclaimer requirement — what it actually says
You’ve seen the line a thousand times: Past results do not guarantee future outcomes. Or the longer version: Past results do not guarantee, warrant, or predict future cases. Every case is different, and the outcome depends on the specific facts and circumstances. That language exists because the bar associations require it, in some form, on any advertising that displays specific case outcomes.
The exact required language varies by state. New York’s rules historically required a specific statement, prominently displayed, on the same page or screen as the result. Florida requires the disclaimer to appear “clearly and conspicuously.” Several states require the disclaimer to be in the same font size as the result itself, not buried in 8-point gray text in the footer. A few states require the disclaimer at the top of the page, not the bottom. The standard “buried in the footer” approach passes nobody’s review if a complaint actually gets filed.
The practical move is to put the disclaimer in three places — at the top of the case results page (one short sentence), next to each individual result (a short repeated tag), and in the page footer (the longer version). Same font as the body copy. Same color. Visible without scrolling on mobile. If your state has specific language requirements, use them verbatim. Don’t paraphrase the bar’s required language to fit your design.
For the deeper ethics layer that generic SEO agencies don’t know exists, see our piece on case result disclaimers over in the reviews and reputation guide.
What “specifics vs generic” actually trades off
The instinct most firms have when they get nervous about Rule 7.1 is to strip out the specifics. The result becomes “Successful settlement in a personal injury matter.” No dollar amount. No case type. No jurisdiction. The disclaimer is the only specific thing on the page. The bar can’t complain about facts that aren’t there.
That instinct is wrong on both ends — it doesn’t make you safer from a bar complaint, and it kills the page as a conversion asset. A bar complaint isn’t filed because you said too much specifics. It’s filed because you said specifics in a way that creates an unjustified expectation. Stripping the specifics doesn’t fix the expectation problem — a page that says “we get great results” with no proof is arguably more misleading than a page that says “in 2023, we secured a $2.4M settlement for a client injured in a rear-end collision on the I-10 in Phoenix; other cases will produce different results.”
Specifics, in context, with disclaimers, are the safer position. They give the bar something to evaluate. They give the searcher something to believe. They give Google something to rank. A page full of vague “successful outcomes” with no case type, no jurisdiction, no description of the work — that page reads like AI-generated filler to a prospect, and it reads like thin content to Google.
The right level of specificity is: case type, the relevant facts a non-lawyer would care about (the injury, the charges, the asset class), the jurisdiction, the rough timeframe, the outcome described in plain English, and the disclaimer. Names are almost never necessary and often a privilege problem. Photos of clients are a no — even with consent, they create issues. Specific medical details beyond what’s already in the public record are a no. The dollar amount is fine if the case was a public settlement or verdict; if it was a confidential resolution, you can describe the outcome as “favorable resolution” or “settled to the client’s satisfaction” without quoting the number.
Structuring case result pages for SEO
This is where most firms leave money on the table. A case results page that lives at /case-results/ as one giant scroll of every verdict and settlement ever achieved is doing nothing for your rankings. It’s a portfolio page. It targets no query. It internal-links to nothing. It exists to impress people who already found the firm — not to win new prospects from search.
The structure that ranks is different. Case results get split by practice area and outcome type, matched to the practice page queries the firm is already chasing. A personal injury firm’s case results live at /personal-injury/case-results/, with sub-pages or anchor sections for car accidents, truck accidents, motorcycle accidents, slip and falls, and whatever else maps to the practice page structure. A criminal defense firm splits by charge type. A family law firm by case type. Each case results sub-page or section internal-links to the matching practice page, and the practice page internal-links to the case results.
This matters because the queries case results pages can actually rank for are practice-area-plus-outcome queries — “personal injury settlements Phoenix,” “DUI cases dismissed Arizona,” “wrongful death verdicts.” A generic /case-results/ page can’t rank for those. A practice-area-scoped case results section can. And the internal linking back to the practice page sends the trust signal Google wants — your site says we handle this kind of case, and here’s the proof.
Individual case writeups — the page you create for one specific notable case — can also rank for very specific queries. A detailed writeup of a $1.8M Phoenix truck accident settlement, with the facts, the strategy, and the outcome, can rank for “truck accident settlement Phoenix” or “I-10 truck accident lawyer.” These are queries with real intent and very little competition. The writeup needs to be substantive — 800 to 1,500 words with real legal analysis, not three sentences. Most firms don’t do this because it requires the attorney to actually write something. The firms that do tend to dominate the long tail.
Schema markup — what helps and what’s theater
Schema markup on case result pages is a place where the industry oversells. There’s no schema type that magically makes case results rank better or earn rich snippets in search. The schema types worth applying are the same ones you’d apply on any substantive content page — and the value is incremental, not transformative.
The two schema types that actually earn their place on case result pages:
- Article schema on individual case writeups. Treat the writeup as an article — author, date published, headline, description. This helps Google understand the page as substantive content, not a thin portfolio entry.
- BreadcrumbList schema showing the hierarchy: Home → Practice Area → Case Results → This Case. This helps Google understand the structural relationship between the case result and the practice page, and occasionally surfaces as breadcrumbs in search results.
A few firms try to use LegalCaseDocument schema. This is a real schema.org type, but Google doesn’t use it for rich results, and it’s primarily designed for legal research databases publishing actual case opinions. Applying it to a marketing summary of a case settlement is closer to schema theater than schema strategy. Won’t hurt you. Won’t help you. Skip it unless you have a reason.
FAQPage schema can be applied to the practice page that references the case results, not to the case results pages themselves — the typical “what’s the average settlement for a car accident” question gets answered with reference to the firm’s actual experience, and the FAQPage schema helps that get featured-snippet eligibility. For the deeper schema picture, see our piece on schema markup for law firms.
What does NOT belong on a case result page: Review schema, AggregateRating schema, anything that looks like you’re self-publishing star ratings tied to case outcomes. Google has been explicit that self-published review markup that hasn’t been verified by a third-party review platform won’t earn rich results — and bar associations are watching review-style markup very carefully. Don’t do it.
Good vs bad case result presentations
Let me show you the difference in concrete terms.
Bad presentation: A grid of fifteen tiles, each one big bold dollar amount in the firm’s accent color — $2.4M, $1.8M, $950K, $3.2M. Below each amount, two words: “Car Accident” or “Slip and Fall.” No facts. No jurisdiction. No timeframe. No disclaimer near the tiles. A small line of gray 9-point text in the footer reads “past results do not guarantee future outcomes.” This page is a Rule 7.1 trip wire AND it converts worse than the firm thinks it does, because prospects scan it once and bounce. There’s nothing to read.
Good presentation: A list of cases, each one written up as a short paragraph. “In 2023, our firm represented a 47-year-old construction worker injured when a delivery truck rear-ended his vehicle on the I-10 near Sky Harbor Airport. He suffered a cervical disc injury requiring surgery and was unable to return to work for nine months. After the insurance company initially offered $185,000 to settle, we filed suit, deposed three witnesses, and engaged a vocational expert. The case settled four months before trial for $2.4 million. Past results don’t guarantee future outcomes; every case turns on its specific facts.” Same dollar amount. Massively more believable. Massively safer under Rule 7.1. Real content for Google. And it’s the kind of thing a prospective client actually reads — because it’s a story, not a brag.
The difference isn’t subtle. The good presentation is more work — somebody has to actually write each entry. That’s the point. The firms that do this tend to rank for the long-tail queries the brag-wall firms never touch, and they convert higher on the same traffic, because the content is doing real work instead of looking impressive at a glance.
The case result page that fits a small firm
I get this question constantly: “We’ve only handled a dozen significant cases. Should we even have a case results page?” The honest answer is yes, with conditions. A dozen well-written case writeups beat fifty thin tiles every time. Twelve real stories, each one substantively described, with disclaimers and proper structure, is plenty of material for a credible case results section. You don’t need to show every case the firm has ever touched. You need to show enough to be believable in the practice areas you actually want to grow.
If you have so few results that a single case results page would look thin, the move is to weave the cases into the practice pages themselves rather than pulling them out into a dedicated page. A personal injury page that includes two or three case examples in context — within the substantive content explaining how the firm handles those cases — does more for both trust and SEO than a sparsely populated case results page with the same three cases isolated.
The reverse is also true. A firm with three hundred cases shouldn’t list three hundred. Curate. Pick the ten to twenty that best demonstrate the breadth and depth of practice. Quality of writeup beats volume of entries.
Confidential settlements and how to talk about them
Most settlement agreements include confidentiality clauses. The dollar amount, the parties, sometimes the very fact of settlement, are bound by an NDA. Firms that handle a lot of business litigation, employment disputes, and certain medical malpractice cases run into this routinely — most of their best work isn’t publishable in any specific form.
The workaround is to describe the case type and the nature of the outcome without quoting numbers or naming parties. “Resolved a multi-million-dollar employment dispute on terms favorable to our client” is fine — the number is in a range that’s not specific enough to identify a confidential settlement. “Negotiated a confidential settlement of a complex commercial dispute involving claims of breach of fiduciary duty” describes the work without violating the NDA. You’re trading off some of the persuasive specificity for legal safety. Better to publish the vaguer version than to risk an NDA breach or a bar complaint over a number you weren’t supposed to disclose.
Public verdicts — the ones that went to a jury, that produced a published opinion — are fair game with full specifics, because the information is already in the public record. Confidential settlements need the abstraction layer.
Tying case results back to the practice page system
The internal linking is where this all comes together. Every case writeup links to the matching practice page. The practice page links to the relevant case results — not in a buried “see more” sidebar, but embedded in the body content where a reader is making the decision to call. (“In the past three years, we’ve resolved cases for clients with injuries similar to yours — see our recent results in truck accident litigation.”) The hub-and-spoke structure that works for an authority site works just as well within a single firm’s site — practice page as hub, case results as proof, attorney bios as the human face.
This is also where Pillar 3 of how we work — fix what’s already there before publishing more — applies hardest. Most firms already have case results somewhere on their site. They’re underused. Wired into the practice pages with the right structure and disclaimers, they become a meaningful conversion asset without the firm publishing a single new word. For the broader picture on the audit-and-fix approach, see our piece on auditing existing practice pages.
If you want a second set of eyes
The free audit I do for firms includes a look at the case results section if there is one — structure, disclaimers (or absence of them), schema, internal linking, and whether the cases are actually doing any conversion work. About half the firms I audit either have nothing on case results or have a brag-wall page that’s a bar complaint waiting to happen. The fix is usually a few hours of writing and a structural reshuffle. Yours to keep whether you hire us or not.
For the broader practice page picture, see the practice pages guide, our piece on structuring practice pages for conversion, and E-E-A-T signals for law firm pages. For the ABA layer that touches everything, see the ABA rules on soliciting client reviews and the broader reviews and reputation guide. For the overall philosophy, our approach.
— The owner, PHX Search Co.