A man in his seventies searches for the law firm that drew up his late wife’s will. He finds a listing with the firm’s name, taps the phone number, and reaches someone who says they can “update the trust today” if he pays a processing fee by card. He almost does. Then something feels off, and he hangs up.
The next morning, his daughter drives him to the firm’s office. The receptionist has never heard of the call. The number he dialed isn’t the firm’s. It came from an old, unclaimed listing that someone else had changed. The firm hadn’t looked at that listing in years, and didn’t know it existed.
Nobody at the firm did anything dishonest. But for a few anxious hours, the firm’s name was attached to something that could have cost a client money and trust. That’s what an inaccurate listing can do. It doesn’t just send people to the wrong place. It can put a business’s good name in someone else’s hands.
This piece follows an invented estate-planning law firm as it sorts out its listings. The firm, its people, and every detail are illustrative, not a client story, and nothing here is a reported result. Nothing here is legal advice either. Where we mention rules, it’s general information, and any firm should check the rules that apply in its own state.
When someone finds a business on a map, a directory, or a search result, they treat what they see as true. The name, the address, the phone number, the hours, the category. They don’t double-check. They tap and call.
For most businesses, a wrong listing is an inconvenience. A customer drives to an old address or calls during hours that changed. For a law firm, especially one that handles wills, trusts, and estates, the stakes are higher. The people calling are often older, often grieving, and often about to share sensitive information about money and family. A wrong number doesn’t just waste their time. It can expose them.
That’s why accuracy is a brand issue, not only a technical one. The firm’s good name is attached to every listing that carries it, whether the firm manages that listing or not.
The firm in our story is like a lot of small professional practices. It has been around for twenty-some years. It has moved once. Two founding partners have retired, and a newer attorney has joined. Over that time, listings drifted:
None of these were created on purpose. They piled up. And any one of them can send a caller somewhere the firm doesn’t control.
The opening story is invented, but the risk is real. Scammers sometimes pose as businesses people trust, and listings are one place they can try to do it.
The Federal Trade Commission has a rule that speaks directly to this. The FTC’s Rule on Impersonation of Government and Businesses, published in the Code of Federal Regulations at 16 CFR Part 461, makes it an unfair or deceptive practice to materially and falsely pose as a business or its officers, or to materially misrepresent an affiliation with a business, including a claim of endorsement or sponsorship. The rule’s definition of a business includes not-for-profit entities.
This is general information, not legal advice. The rule doesn’t make a business responsible for monitoring the whole internet. But it does show that impersonation is taken seriously, and it’s a reminder that a business is in the best position to notice when its own name is being misused. A firm that knows where its listings are, and what they say, will notice faster.
Law firms have another reason to care. Lawyers in the United States are subject to rules of professional conduct about how they describe their services.
The American Bar Association’s Model Rule 7.1, Communication Concerning a Lawyer’s Services, says a lawyer shall not make a false or misleading communication about the lawyer or the lawyer’s services. It explains that a communication is misleading if it contains a material misrepresentation of fact or law, or leaves out a fact needed to make the statement as a whole not materially misleading.
The ABA Model Rules are a model. Each state adopts its own version, and the details differ. This is general information, not legal advice, and any firm should check its own state’s rules and, if needed, ask its state bar. But the principle is easy to apply to listings. A live listing for a retired attorney, a practice area the firm doesn’t handle, or a category that suggests a specialty the firm doesn’t claim can all create a misleading impression, even if nobody meant it to.
For a law firm, a listings cleanup isn’t vanity. It’s part of keeping the firm’s public statements accurate.
The firm’s cleanup starts by agreeing on the truth. Before anyone touches a directory, the office manager writes down a single, correct version of the firm’s details:
That one document becomes the source of truth. Every listing gets compared against it. The same facts on the door should match the same facts on every listing.
Next, the firm finds out where it appears. The office manager searches for the firm’s name, its current and former addresses, its main phone number, old phone numbers, and the names of current and former attorneys. She checks the major maps and search platforms, legal directories, the local chamber of commerce, the bar association’s lawyer directory, and any review sites that come up.
She keeps a simple spreadsheet: where the listing is, what it says, whether the firm has claimed it, and what’s wrong.
The list is longer than anyone expected. That’s normal.
Not every problem is equally urgent. The firm fixes them in order of how much harm they could do.
First: wrong phone numbers and duplicates. Anything that could send a caller to someone other than the firm comes first. Duplicates are reported or merged through each platform’s process.
Second: unclaimed listings. Claiming a listing, where the platform allows it, means the firm is notified of suggested changes and can correct them.
Third: former attorneys. Listings for attorneys who’ve retired or left are updated or closed according to each platform’s rules. Where a listing can’t be removed, the firm makes sure it doesn’t point to a number or address that someone else controls.
Fourth: categories and practice areas. Listings are updated to describe what the firm actually does, with nothing that suggests a specialty it doesn’t claim.
Fifth: hours and details. Regular hours, holiday hours, website links, and descriptions are brought into line.
It helps to walk through a single fix. Take the old, unclaimed listing that sent the man in the opening to the wrong number.
The office manager finds it by searching the firm’s name on the platform where he found it. The listing shows the firm’s name and an old address, but the phone number belongs to someone else. She checks the platform’s process for claiming a business. It asks her to verify that she represents the firm, which she does using the method the platform offers.
Once the listing is claimed, she corrects the phone number, the address, and the hours to match the source-of-truth document. She checks whether there’s a second listing for the same firm on that platform. There is, so she follows the platform’s process to report the duplicate. She takes screenshots before and after, and notes the date in the spreadsheet.
Then she does one more thing. Because the wrong number may have been used to impersonate the firm, she writes down what the client was told, reports the listing activity to the platform, and files a report with the FTC. The firm’s managing attorney calls the client personally to explain what happened and what the firm has done.
That last step matters as much as the technical fix. A correction that the client never hears about doesn’t repair much trust. A call from the attorney does.
Law firms change over time. Attorneys join, retire, move to other firms, or change their focus. Each of those is a listings event, and it’s easy to miss.
The firm adds a short checklist to its process for every transition:
Professional-conduct rules may also address how firms handle announcements and firm names when lawyers come and go. Those rules vary by state. Again, this is general information, not legal advice.
Estate-planning firms often work alongside financial advisors, accountants, insurance professionals, and other attorneys. When one of those partners refers a client, the client usually searches for the firm before calling.
If the client finds an old address, a duplicate listing, or a retired attorney’s name, the referral starts on an uncertain note. Worse, the partner who made the referral may hear about it. Accurate listings protect the firm’s reputation with its referral partners as well as its clients. They make it easy for a partner to say, “Call them. You’ll find them right where they should be.”
A cleanup is a project. Accuracy is a habit. The firm sets a few simple routines:
Keeping this up by hand is possible for a small firm, but it’s tedious. Depending on your edition and how your account is set up, a listings platform like the one WeKinnect works with can help a firm keep its details consistent across major sources from one place, set regular and holiday hours, and monitor directories for missing or incorrect listings. Some editions can also help suppress duplicate listings and re-establish accurate information if a third party changes it.
A platform doesn’t replace the source-of-truth document or the person who owns it. It makes it easier to push the right facts out and notice when something drifts. It also doesn’t guarantee that every directory will update right away, or that a listing will appear in any particular position. Directories update on their own schedules.
The firm also adds one more layer of protection: telling clients what’s normal.
In engagement letters and on its website, the firm explains how it communicates. For example, that it won’t ask for payment by gift card or over an unexpected phone call, and that clients can always call the main number on their engagement letter to confirm any request. That doesn’t fix a bad listing, but it gives a client like the man in the opening a reason to pause.
The firm also makes sure its own website lists the same address, phone number, and hours as its listings, so a client who checks will find the same facts in both places.
Duplicate listings cause a quieter problem, too. When a firm has two listings on the same platform, its reviews can be split between them. A client who leaves a thoughtful review may post it on the duplicate, where few people see it. Another person may find the duplicate first, see only a couple of old reviews, and form an impression of the firm that doesn’t reflect its current work.
Merging or removing duplicates through each platform’s process helps bring a firm’s public picture back into one place. It doesn’t guarantee that every review moves over, and platforms handle this differently, so the firm notes what happens with each one.
There’s also a professional-conduct question worth keeping in mind. Some state rules address how lawyers may use client reviews and whether they can offer anything in exchange for them. A firm should check its own state’s rules before asking clients for reviews at all. This is general information, not legal advice.
It’s worth thinking about what a careful caller, like the man’s daughter, would check before trusting a listing. She might look at whether the address matches the firm’s website, whether the phone number on the listing matches the one on her father’s paperwork, whether the attorney names are current, and whether the hours make sense.
If all of those match, she has good reason to trust what she found. If any of them don’t, she has a reason to stop and ask. A firm that keeps its facts the same everywhere makes that check easy, and makes a mismatch stand out, which is exactly what you want when someone else is trying to use your name.
Adding keywords to the business name. It’s tempting to list the firm as “Smith Estate Planning Wills Trusts Lawyer.” It doesn’t match the sign, it can violate platform guidelines, and for a law firm it can raise professional-conduct questions.
Ignoring directories you didn’t create. Unclaimed listings are where a lot of trouble starts.
Fixing once and forgetting. Listings drift. Check them on a schedule.
Leaving former attorneys up. It confuses callers and can create a misleading impression.
Choosing a category for traffic, not accuracy. Pick the category that honestly describes your main work.
Promising results. No listing can guarantee a ranking or a number of calls. Be wary of anyone who says otherwise.
Accurate listings matter just as much for nonprofit legal aid organizations, and in some ways more. The people looking for them are often in urgent situations, such as an eviction, a custody issue, or a benefits denial, and may not have the money to hire a private lawyer.
The Legal Services Corporation, which funds civil legal aid organizations across the country, offers a way to find legal help through the organizations it funds. A legal aid group’s listings should match what people find there: the right office, the right intake number, the right hours, and the right description of who the organization serves.
A legal aid organization’s cleanup would look a lot like the firm’s, with a few differences. It may have several offices, each with different intake hours. It may serve only certain counties or certain kinds of cases. Its listings should say so clearly, so people don’t spend time calling an office that can’t help them. And if an impersonator ever charges a fee in the organization’s name for services it provides for free, that’s a serious harm to people who can least afford it, and worth reporting quickly.
The man in the opening story trusted the firm’s name. He didn’t know that the number he called had nothing to do with the firm. To him, it was the firm.
That’s the real reason accurate listings matter. Every place your name appears is a promise about who will answer, where they’ll be, and what they’ll do. Keeping those facts accurate is one of the simplest ways to protect the good name you’ve spent years building.
If you’d like help finding your listings, correcting them, and keeping them accurate, start a conversation with WeKinnect. Bring your current address, phone number, hours, and a list of everyone who has practiced under your name, and we’ll start there.
Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash
Written By
Maren Hale focuses on brand positioning at WeKinnect Global Branding Agency. Guided by the core value of Service before Self, she writes for entrepreneurs and family-owned legacy businesses. Maren writes on Business Listings, Google Business Profile, SEO, GEO (being found by AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok), and Community. WeKinnect serves businesses across restaurants, arts, travel and tourism, banking, home services, nonprofits, and the pet industry. Maren brings that same spirit of service to every piece she writes.
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