Why I Don’t Have a Google Review Page

If you look for this practice on Google, you will not find a wall of five-star reviews. That is deliberate, and I think prospective clients are entitled to know why rather than being left to guess.

Almost every consultant who looks at a law practice says the same thing: ask every satisfied client for a Google review. For most kinds of legal work that advice is reasonable. There is nothing controversial about having a lawyer draft your will or help you after an auto accident. For student defense, though, the consideration is different. Most prospective clients come to me because of the potential harm that something publicized or held against them can cause. They want it to be part of the past and to go away, and a Google review does not do that.

What a Google review actually asks a student to do

A Google review is not anonymous in any practical sense. It carries a name, often a real one, frequently attached to a photograph and to an account the person has used for years. It is indexed, it is durable, and it sits in the results for that name alongside everything else about them.

Now consider what my clients were dealing with when they hired me. An academic integrity allegation. A professionalism referral. A Title IX complaint. A dismissal from a nursing or medical program. A conduct charge that could have ended a license before the career attached to it started. These are not matters people want indexed under their own name.

A review that says a student defense lawyer helped them is, by simple inference, a statement that they were accused of something. It can be read by a residency program, a licensing board, a graduate admissions committee, a hiring manager, or a family member who was never told. The case ends. The search result does not.

The record follows the student, not me

Most of my clients spend months trying to keep a matter out of their permanent record. They negotiate over transcript notations. They ask what a file will say and who can see it. They think carefully about the wording of a resolution because they understand it will follow them.

It would be strange to spend that much effort limiting an institutional record and then invite the same student to publish the underlying story voluntarily, in a place indexed more thoroughly than any university file. The point of the work is that the matter stops following them. A review undoes part of what they hired me to accomplish.

A request from your lawyer is never really neutral

There is also the question of pressure, which I do not think can be engineered away. When a lawyer asks a client for a public favor, the client hears it in the context of the relationship. Asking during a representation is worse, because a client may wonder whether declining affects the attention their matter receives. Asking afterward is gentler but not neutral, because gratitude and obligation are difficult to separate, particularly for a young person who has just been through a frightening process with an adult who helped them.

Even leaving a review link in a closing letter is a request. It communicates an expectation and puts the client in the position of deciding whether to disappoint someone. I would rather remove that decision entirely than design a softer version of it.

To be clear, no former client is prevented from writing whatever they want, wherever they want. This is about not asking, and not building a system that quietly does the asking for me.

What I offer instead

For prospective clients who want more than my own description of my work, I keep references available on request for pre-litigation (after the records review and meeting is finished) and litigation matters. These are former clients who volunteered, who gave permission in advance, and who decided for themselves what they are willing to discuss. Additionally, I represent clients in state and federal courts, and those matters are publicly available.

The exchange happens privately, one conversation at a time, rather than in a public index. That keeps the choice with the person whose story it is, and it keeps the disclosure limited to the person who actually needs it in order to make a hiring decision.

The professional rules make this harder than it looks

There is a compliance dimension as well. Lawyer advertising rules limit what can be said about past results and how client statements may be used, and confidentiality obligations attach to the fact of a representation, not only to its details. In this practice area, confirming that someone was a client can itself reveal something sensitive about them.

Negative reviews raise the same problem from the other direction. A lawyer generally cannot respond to a public complaint by explaining what actually happened, because the explanation would require disclosing client information. A review system that a lawyer cannot answer without violating confidentiality is a poor fit for a practice built on discretion.

What I am still working on

I have not concluded that there is no acceptable version of this. I am looking at approaches that would let prospective clients hear from people other than me without asking anyone to trade their privacy for it: written statements shared privately with informed consent, references limited to what the client has expressly approved, and structures that do not attach a name to an allegation in a public index.

Whatever it turns into will have to satisfy the advertising rules and the confidentiality obligations that apply to me, and it will have to be something a former student can decline without any awkwardness at all. Until it meets both tests, the honest answer is that the reviews are missing on purpose.

Better questions than a star rating

If you are evaluating a student defense lawyer, a review count tells you very little, especially since it is possible to buy fake reviews. Instead, ask who will actually handle the matter and who will attend the hearing. Ask how fees are structured and what the scope covers. Ask what the lawyer has done in matters procedurally similar to yours, and what the realistic range of outcomes looks like. Check the bar record. Those answers are harder to obtain than a rating, and they are worth considerably more.

General information about how I work, including flat fees and the scope of a representation, is on the fees and scope of services page. If your matter is at a Florida institution, the school-specific pages are indexed on the Florida schools page.

This is general information about the matters I handle and the law that applies to them. It is not legal advice about your situation, and the law in this area can change. For advice on your matter, start with the Full Read + Game Plan — your entire file read, straight answers, and exactly what to do next, in what order.