Most firms bury their best proof. Verdicts and settlements get dumped onto one long page, sorted by nothing in particular, formatted as a column of dollar figures with no story attached. That page pulls almost no search traffic, and the people who do land on it leave without calling. Meanwhile the same firm spends thousands a month on ads pointing at a contact form that asks a stranger to trust them.
Key Takeaways
- One combined “Case Results” page is a dead end. Individual pages, one per meaningful outcome, give you something to rank and something to link to.
- The dollar figure isn’t the story. What the client faced, what the other side argued, and how the case moved is what convinces a reader.
- Every state bar has rules about advertising past results. Get the disclaimer right and get it near the number, not buried in the footer.
- Result pages feed practice area pages through internal links, which is where most of the ranking benefit shows up.
- Track assisted conversions, not just direct form fills. These pages usually close deals they don’t get credit for.
Why the single results page fails
Think about what that page is actually asking a search engine to do. It covers a truck crash, a slip and fall at a grocery store, a wrongful death, a commercial dispute, and thirty other matters, all on one URL. There’s no topic. There’s no query it answers cleanly. So it ranks for the firm’s own name and nothing else.
It fails on the human side too. A woman whose husband died in a construction accident scrolls past nineteen car wreck settlements before she finds anything close to her situation, and by then she’s already gone back to the results page. The number she needed was there. She just never reached it.
Splitting results into individual pages fixes both problems at once. Each one gets a URL, a title, a narrative, and a specific practice area to attach itself to.
What belongs on an individual result page
You don’t need a novel. Four hundred to seven hundred words does the job if the words are the right ones. The mistake we see constantly is a page that reads like a press release, all outcome and no context.
The situation, told plainly
Start with the client’s problem in the language a non-lawyer would use. Not “plaintiff sustained injuries in a multi-vehicle collision on I-95.” Something closer to: a delivery driver was stopped at a light when a box truck hit him from behind at forty miles an hour. Same facts, but one of them sounds like a person.
What made it hard
This is the part firms skip, and it’s the part that sells. The insurer denied liability. The client had a prior back injury the defense hammered on. There was a two-year gap in treatment. Whatever the obstacle was, name it. A result with no obstacle reads like luck; a result that came out of a fight reads like skill.
What you did about it
Two or three sentences on the work. Retained a biomechanical expert. Deposed the fleet manager and found a maintenance log the carrier had never produced. Filed suit after the second lowball offer. Readers can’t evaluate legal strategy, but they can tell the difference between a firm that pushed and one that took the first check.
The outcome and the disclaimer
State the number, state whether it was a verdict, a settlement, or an arbitration award, and put your bar-required disclaimer right there with it. More on that below.
The compliance layer
Every state regulates how lawyers advertise past results, and the rules aren’t uniform. Some states require a statement that results depend on the facts of each case. Some require you to disclose whether the figure is gross or net of fees and costs. A few restrict how prominently you can display a number at all. New Jersey and Florida have historically been stricter than most, and rules change.
Three practical habits keep you out of trouble:
- Put the disclaimer on the same screen as the figure. Footer disclaimers have been treated as insufficient in more than one jurisdiction.
- Get client consent in writing before publishing any matter, even one that’s part of the public record. Consent protects the relationship as much as it protects you.
- Have your ethics counsel review the template once, then reuse it. You shouldn’t be making a judgment call on every page.
Confidential settlements are their own category. If the terms are sealed you can often still describe the matter type and the work without the number, and honestly, those pages sometimes convert better because the narrative has to carry the weight.
How these pages actually earn rankings
Here’s the part people get backwards. Individual result pages rarely rank for high-value commercial terms on their own. A page about a $1.4 million truck accident settlement isn’t going to outrank a well-built practice area page for “truck accident lawyer Tampa,” and it shouldn’t try.
What they do is feed the pages that can. Every result page links up to its practice area page with anchor text that matches the topic, which builds an internal cluster. Search engines read that structure as depth. A firm with one truck accident page looks thin next to a firm with a truck accident page supported by eleven documented outcomes, and the rankings tend to follow.
They also pick up long-tail traffic you’d never target directly. Someone searching “average settlement rear-end accident herniated disc” isn’t ready to hire anyone, but they’re a real person with a real case, and they’ll remember whose page answered the question. Add proper schema markup and these pages become quotable for AI search results too, which increasingly matters more than the blue link.
Formatting for people who skim
Nobody reads these pages start to finish. Build for the scan: a headline that names the case type and the outcome, a short summary box near the top, subheads every few paragraphs, and one clear call to action that doesn’t shout. A “Cases like yours” module linking to three related results keeps people moving through the site instead of bouncing back to Google.
Skip the stock photo of a gavel. If you can use a photo of the actual attorney who handled the matter, use that instead. It’s a small thing that makes the page feel like it belongs to a real office.
Measuring it without fooling yourself
Result pages almost never get credit in a last-click report. Someone reads four of them on a Tuesday night, thinks about it for a week, then searches your firm name and calls. Your analytics will attribute that to direct traffic.
Look at assisted conversions instead, and at a simpler signal: ask your intake team to note when a caller mentions a specific case. That anecdotal data is messier than a dashboard but it’s often more honest. Watch time on page and scroll depth as well. A result page with a forty-second average and a 30% scroll depth isn’t being read, and the fix is usually the opening paragraph.
Start with your ten strongest outcomes, one page each, published over a month. Then add new ones as they close. Firms that make this a habit end up with a library of proof that compounds, while their competitors are still updating a single page nobody visits.
