The question your site has to survive
Referral questions to an assistant are unusually specific: a practice area, a jurisdiction, sometimes a fee structure or a language. Answering one requires facts that are on your site somewhere and are frequently unreachable: which courts you appear in, which matters you take, whether the first consultation is chargeable, where you are admitted.
Law-firm sites are also unusually heavy. A practice-area page is typically a large template wrapped around a few paragraphs of substance, which is the worst possible ratio for a reader on a token budget. On the reference document capture, a services page fell from 13,581 bytes to 1,412 and its first substantive fact moved from character 10,152 to line 8.
The facts worth making reachable
Not marketing copy. The specific, checkable items a referral question turns on, stated as text a parser can read rather than implied by a page’s design.
- Jurisdictions and admissions. Where the firm and its lawyers are actually admitted to practise.
- Practice areas, named plainly. The words a client would use, not only the ones the profession uses.
- Matters you take and do not take. Declining clearly is as useful to a referral as accepting.
- Consultation terms. Whether the first meeting is chargeable, and on what basis.
- Locations and contact. Present in the text, not only in a map widget that loads after JavaScript.
- Languages. Frequently decisive in a referral question and almost never machine-readable.
Nothing about your firm is generated
This matters more here than almost anywhere else, so it is worth being exact about the architecture rather than reassuring in general terms. No model runs when a page is served. The renderer prints values you already store, and the validator rejects a variant containing a number or a claim that did not come from a source field.
The practical effect is that the markdown an assistant reads cannot contain an outcome, a rate, a guarantee or a credential that your own records do not carry. A missing fact stays missing rather than being smoothed over, which is the correct failure mode for a regulated profession.