We ran structured audits across a cross-section of SA law firm websites
Rather than publish a single case study, we looked for the pattern. Across a cross-section of South African law firm websites - spanning sole practitioners, boutique firms, and established mid-size practices - the same handful of gaps show up again and again. No firm is named here; what matters is the pattern, because it's the same pattern most firms are carrying without knowing it.
What shows up most often, by pillar
Law Society / LPC conduct
The most common finding is a publicity page - usually the homepage or an "About" page - that makes a comparative or superlative claim ("the best," "leading," "top-rated") without qualification. LPC Rule 7 restricts this kind of language directly, and most firms have never had the copy reviewed against the rule since it was first written.
POPIA
Contact and consultation-request forms submitting personal information with no visible privacy notice or lawful-basis statement at the point of collection. A close second: no named, contactable Information Officer anywhere on the site, and third-party trackers (analytics, chat widgets) loading before any consent mechanism runs.
Security
Outdated CMS or plugin versions with known, publicly disclosed vulnerabilities, and no visible security headers (CSP, HSTS) on the response. Neither is exotic to fix - both are the kind of gap that accumulates silently on a site nobody has touched since launch.
SEO
Practice area pages that exist but carry almost no unique content - a paragraph or two, no FAQ, no local business schema, no attorney-level authorship. These pages rank poorly and, more importantly, supply nothing for AI-generated answers to cite.
AI readiness
Close to universal: no structured data (schema.org markup) describing the firm, its practice areas, or its attorneys as entities. Without it, AI assistants have nothing reliable to extract, so the firm is effectively invisible in AI-generated answers even when it ranks in traditional search.
Path to action
Contact information buried below the fold, no clear next step on practice area pages, and enquiry forms that ask for more information than a first-touch enquiry needs - each one a small amount of friction that adds up to fewer completed enquiries.
None of this is a reflection of the legal work
These are website findings, not commentary on the quality of legal practice - the two are unrelated. What the pattern shows is that website compliance and structure are rarely anyone's assigned responsibility inside a firm, which is exactly the gap a structured audit is built to close.