For a firm competing in local search, review count and rating do an enormous amount of work. They influence where you appear in the map results and they influence whether someone calls you rather than the firm above you. The technical SEO work matters, and reviews frequently matter more.
Most firms have no system. They have good clients who would happily leave a review and nobody ever asks.
Ask at resolution
Timing beats wording by a wide margin. The moment to ask is when the matter resolves well and the client is thanking you. That is peak satisfaction, and it decays fast.
Two weeks later, they have moved on. Two months later, they barely remember the details.
Build it into your closing process so it happens without anyone deciding. When the matter status changes to resolved, a text goes out. Not an email with a link buried in a paragraph. A text, because it gets read, with a direct link that opens the review form in one tap.
Ask the person who worked with them most to send it. A request from the paralegal who spoke with them weekly converts better than one from an attorney they met twice.
What not to do
Do not offer anything of value. Not a gift card, not a discount, not a drawing entry. It violates platform policy, it may violate your professional conduct rules, and the reviews it produces read as purchased to anyone scanning them.
Do not write reviews for clients or provide a script. A page of reviews using similar phrasing is obvious to readers and to platform detection.
Do not filter, which means asking clients privately how satisfied they are and only sending the review link to the happy ones. Platforms treat this as review gating and it violates their policies.
Do not ask a client whose matter went badly. This should be self-evident and firms still automate the request off a status change without excluding poor outcomes.
Responding, and the confidentiality trap
Respond to every review. Positive ones get a short, specific thank you. Negative ones need considerably more care.
The trap is specific and lawyers have been disciplined for it. A former client posts a review that is inaccurate or unfair. The natural instinct is to correct the record, which means explaining what actually happened, which means disclosing information about the representation.
Your confidentiality duty does not evaporate because the client complained publicly. A client’s public criticism is not a blanket waiver, and several jurisdictions have made clear that a lawyer’s self-defense exception is narrower than lawyers assume in this context.
The response that works acknowledges the person’s dissatisfaction, says nothing about the facts of the matter, states your general commitment to communication and service, and invites them to contact the firm directly. It is unsatisfying to write and it is the right answer. The broader supervision and confidentiality framework is covered in AI ethics for lawyers.
Where AI helps
Drafting responses at volume, especially when reviews arrive faster than anyone wants to write replies. Load your response guidelines into a Project, including the hard rule that no response may reference any fact about a representation, and have it draft.
Keeping the tone right on negative reviews. This is the underrated one. When a review is unfair, everything you write at that moment is worse than what you would write the next morning. A drafted response gives you a measured starting point that is not written from irritation.
Summarizing patterns. Twenty reviews mentioning slow callbacks is not twenty complaints, it is one operations problem. Ask for themes across your reviews and across competitors’ reviews, and you will find both your weakness and their weakness.
Every draft gets human review before it posts. On negative reviews, that review is specifically checking that nothing confirms any detail about the representation.
Do this today
Count how many clients your firm closed matters for in the last 90 days, and how many reviews you received in the same period.
The gap between those two numbers is your entire opportunity, and it is almost always large. Then send one text to the most recent satisfied client, with the direct link. That is the pilot, and it takes two minutes.