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A practical guide to designing websites for law firms that operate across borders.
A law firm that operates in one country and one language faces a straightforward website challenge: define the practice areas, present the team, publish content, and make it easy to get in touch. The architecture is linear and the decisions are manageable.
A law firm that operates across jurisdictions - with offices in multiple countries, attorneys qualified in different legal systems, practices that share a name but differ in substance from one market to another, and clients who expect to read about the firm in their own language - faces an entirely different challenge. The architecture is no longer linear. It is a matrix. And most agencies that build law firm websites have never navigated it.
At Smotrów Design, we have been building websites for international legal practices for more than a decade - from firms with a single cross-border focus like Bimaris and Andoni Law & Tax to full-service practices operating across multiple jurisdictions like AVELLUM and Moris. Each project taught us something about the structural, linguistic, and governance challenges that international firms face - and how to solve them through architecture rather than workarounds.
This article shares what we have learned.
This article is part of our series on designing websites for law firms, which includes guides on five key elements of a law firm website, homepage content, attorney profile pages, practice area pages, contact page design, photography, website SEO, CRM integration, website technology, lead generation, how to choose a website design agency, and when to approach a redesign.
The challenges of an international law firm website are not cosmetic. They are structural. Every layer of the website - from navigation to content to URL architecture to SEO - must account for the fact that the firm operates in multiple legal, linguistic, and cultural contexts simultaneously.
A firm's Corporate & M&A practice in Ukraine and its Corporate & M&A practice in Albania may share a name - but they involve different regulatory frameworks, different transaction types, different teams, and often different client profiles. As we discussed in our guide to practice area pages, each practice area page should demonstrate genuine expertise through specific representative experience. For an international firm, this means the page must either accommodate jurisdictional differences within a single page or be split into jurisdiction-specific versions - a decision that affects the entire site architecture.
A partner who is qualified in both England and Ukraine, leads the firm's energy practice across both jurisdictions, and publishes in two languages creates a complex web of relationships that the CMS must model cleanly. As we covered in our guide to attorney profile pages, every profile should link to the practices and publications it relates to. For international firms, this means the profile must connect to practice pages in multiple jurisdictions and publications in multiple languages - without creating a confusing user experience.
A legal alert published in English and Ukrainian is not two pieces of content - it is one piece of content that exists in two languages. The CMS must understand this relationship so that the website can show the visitor the version in their preferred language, and so that search engines can associate the two versions through hreflang tags rather than treating them as duplicate content.
A visitor who lands on the firm's website from London expects to see London-relevant content, London-based attorneys, and a London contact address without having to navigate through a global sitemap. A visitor from Kyiv expects the same for Kyiv. The website must balance a unified firm identity with geographic relevance - showing one firm, not a collection of regional offices.
The most consequential structural decision for an international law firm website is whether to build one unified site or separate sites per jurisdiction or language.
This is the approach we use most frequently, and the one we recommend for most international firms. A single domain (firm.com) with language versions accessible through a switcher - typically implemented as subdirectories (/en/, /ua/, /de/) or through a language selector in the header.
The advantages are significant. One domain consolidates all SEO authority - every backlink strengthens the entire site rather than being split across separate domains. The firm presents as a unified entity, which reinforces the institutional brand. Content management is centralized, which simplifies governance and reduces the risk of language versions drifting apart.
This is the approach we used for AVELLUM, which operates as "Internationally Ukrainian" - a unified brand identity that serves both domestic and international audiences from a single domain, with English as the primary language for international clients and Ukrainian for the domestic market.
For firms where each office operates with significant independence - different brands, different client bases, different practice focuses - separate sites may be appropriate. This is rare among law firms but common among accounting networks and consulting alliances where each member firm has its own identity.
The trade-off: separate domains split SEO authority, create maintenance overhead (every structural change must be replicated), and make it harder to present the firm as a unified institution.
A middle ground: firm.com for the global site, uk.firm.com for the UK office, ua.firm.com for Ukraine. This preserves some SEO unity while allowing each office to maintain distinct content. The challenge is that subdomains are treated as semi-separate entities by Google, so the authority consolidation is weaker than with subdirectories.
For most international law firms, a single domain with language subdirectories offers the strongest combination of SEO authority, brand unity, and content governance.
Adding a second or third language to a law firm website is not a translation exercise. It is an architectural decision that affects the CMS, the URL structure, the SEO strategy, and the editorial workflow.
A critical distinction that many firms overlook. Language is about the words on the page. Locale is about the full context: language, region, legal conventions, date formats, and cultural expectations. A firm that serves English-speaking clients in both the UK and the US may need two English locales - one with UK legal terminology and conventions, another with US conventions - even though both are "in English."
For most international law firms, language-level implementation is sufficient. Locale-level implementation is warranted only when the same language serves genuinely distinct markets with different legal systems.
The recommended approach is language subdirectories on a single domain:
All English-language pages live under this path. This is typically the default and the canonical version for international audiences.
All Ukrainian-language pages live under this path, mirroring the English structure where translations exist.
If the firm serves German-speaking markets, a third subdirectory follows the same pattern.
This structure is clean, scalable, and the most SEO-friendly option. Google understands subdirectories as language versions of the same site and consolidates authority across them - provided hreflang tags are implemented correctly.
Hreflang tags are HTML attributes that tell search engines which language and regional version of a page to show to which audience. Without hreflang, Google may show the Ukrainian version of a practice area page to an English-speaking searcher in London - or treat the two language versions as duplicate content and suppress one of them.
Every page that exists in multiple languages must include hreflang tags pointing to all its language versions, including itself. The implementation is technical but essential - and it must be maintained as new pages are added. This is one of the areas where the technology stack matters: modern frameworks like Next.js handle hreflang generation programmatically through the CMS, ensuring that every new page automatically receives the correct tags. Template-based platforms often require manual implementation - which is error-prone and difficult to maintain at scale.
Not every page needs to exist in every language. The decision about what to translate should be driven by audience, not by symmetry.
Homepage, key practice area pages, contact page, About page, attorney profiles for partners and senior lawyers who serve cross-border clients. These pages must exist in every language the firm supports because they are the pages that international visitors will evaluate first.
Publications and legal alerts. A publication about Ukrainian regulatory changes may only need to exist in Ukrainian and English - not in every language the firm supports. A publication about EU-wide regulation may need to exist in all languages.
Career pages (unless the firm actively recruits internationally), internal policy pages, very jurisdiction-specific content that has no cross-border relevance.
The CMS must support asymmetric content across languages - meaning some pages exist in all languages, some in two, and some in only one. This is standard in modern headless CMS platforms like Strapi and Sanity, but can be difficult to implement cleanly in WordPress.
An international law firm's offices are not just contact addresses. They represent the firm's physical presence in a jurisdiction, the team based there, and the practices available locally. The website must present this clearly without fragmenting the user experience.
Each office should have a dedicated page with the physical address, local phone number, a map, the attorneys based at that office, and the key practices offered from that location. As we discussed in our guide to law firm website SEO, each office page should include LocalBusiness or LegalService schema markup with specific geo-coordinates - this supports local search visibility in each market.
As we covered in our guide to contact page design, the contact page must make it easy for visitors to find the right office. For international firms, this means either a tabbed layout (one tab per office) or a single page with clearly separated office blocks. The contact form should include a field that allows the visitor to select which office or jurisdiction their inquiry relates to - this ensures the CRM routes the inquiry to the right team automatically.
Some attorneys work from a single office. Others split time between two or more locations. The CMS must model this accurately - an attorney's profile should indicate which offices they are associated with, and each office page should display the attorneys based there. This cross-referencing requires structured data in the CMS, not hardcoded lists.
For a single-office firm, content governance is straightforward: someone writes, someone approves, someone publishes. For an international firm with offices in three countries, partners who publish in two languages, and a communications team split across time zones, governance becomes a genuine operational challenge.
The content management system must support role-based permissions that reflect the firm's structure. Partners in the Kyiv office should be able to approve content for their practice areas. The London communications team should be able to publish across all language versions. Associates should be able to draft but not publish. This is not a feature request - it is a requirement for any international law firm website.
As we discussed in our guide to website technology, modern headless CMS platforms like Strapi offer granular role-based access control that maps naturally to a law firm's internal hierarchy. This is one of the practical advantages of choosing a purpose-built CMS over a generic platform.
Professional translation for legal content is not optional - machine translation produces errors in legal terminology that can be embarrassing or worse. The CMS should support a translation workflow: content is created in the primary language, sent for professional translation, reviewed by a local attorney, and published. The status of each page in each language should be visible in the CMS - so the team can see at a glance which content is current, which is pending translation, and which is out of date.
When a practice area page is updated in English - a new representative matter is added, a ranking is refreshed, a team member changes - the corresponding page in other languages must be updated as well. Without a system for tracking these changes, language versions drift apart over time, and international visitors encounter outdated content. The CMS should flag pages where the primary language version has been updated but other language versions have not yet been refreshed.
International SEO adds layers of complexity to every principle we covered in our guide to law firm website SEO. Here are the specific considerations.
As discussed above, every page that exists in multiple languages must include correctly implemented hreflang tags. Errors in hreflang - missing self-referencing tags, inconsistent page pairs, or pointing to non-existent URLs - can cause Google to suppress the wrong language version or ignore the tags entirely. Audit hreflang monthly.
For firms that want to rank in specific national markets, Google Search Console allows geographic targeting at the subdirectory level. This means /ua/ content can be targeted to Ukraine and /en/ content can be left as international. This is more nuanced than it sounds - a firm with a London office that wants to rank in the UK for "corporate law firm London" needs UK-targeted English content, not just generic English content.
Backlinks from UK legal directories strengthen the firm's visibility in UK search results. Backlinks from Ukrainian legal publications strengthen visibility in Ukraine. An international firm needs a backlink strategy for each market it operates in - not just one global effort. Directory profiles in Chambers, Legal 500, and jurisdiction-specific directories should be maintained for each office and each market.
Each office page should include LegalService or LocalBusiness schema markup with the specific address, phone number, and geo-coordinates. This supports Google Business Profile integration and local search visibility for each office location.
As we covered in our guide to law firm photography, consistency across attorney headshots is essential - and it becomes significantly more challenging when the team is distributed across multiple offices and countries. The photographic standard (background, lighting, framing, file specifications) must be documented precisely enough that a photographer in any city can produce results that match the firm-wide standard.
A website redesign is the ideal moment to invest in coordinated photoshoots across all offices - resetting the visual baseline so that the team page communicates unity rather than fragmentation.
Google Translate and similar tools produce readable but unreliable translations. In a legal context, a mistranslated term can change the meaning of a practice description, misrepresent the firm's capabilities, or create compliance issues in jurisdictions with strict legal advertising rules. Professional translation by someone who understands legal terminology is not a cost to be optimized - it is a quality requirement.
Some firms translate every word of every page into every language, including content that is only relevant to one jurisdiction. This creates bloat, increases maintenance overhead, and dilutes the relevance of each language version. Asymmetric content - where each language version includes only what is relevant to its audience - is more effective for both users and search engines.
Without hreflang tags, Google treats language versions as either duplicate content (suppressing one) or unrelated pages (showing the wrong version to the wrong audience). Either outcome undermines the firm's search visibility. Hreflang is not optional for multi-language sites - it is essential infrastructure.
Some international firms allow each office to develop its own visual style on the website - different color palettes, different photography styles, different navigation patterns. This fragments the brand and communicates that the firm is a loose collection of offices rather than a unified institution. One firm, one design system, one visual identity - adapted to local content but consistent in structure and style.
An international law firm website is not a domestic site with a language switcher added on top. It is a fundamentally different architectural challenge - one that requires careful decisions about jurisdiction-specific content, multi-language implementation, multi-office presentation, content governance, and cross-border SEO. The firms that get this right present a unified, professional, and trustworthy digital presence across every market they serve. The firms that get it wrong present a fragmented, inconsistent experience that undermines the institutional brand they have spent years building.
The technology stack matters more for international sites than for any other type of law firm website - handling hreflang, multi-language content models, structured data per office, and role-based governance requires a modern CMS and a framework that supports these capabilities natively. The agency that builds it must have direct experience with international legal practices - because the architectural decisions made in the first weeks of the project will determine whether the website scales gracefully or collapses under its own complexity.
This article is part of our series on designing websites for law firms. For guidance on specific pages and elements, explore our guides on homepage content, practice area pages, attorney profile pages, contact page design, photography, website SEO, CRM integration, website technology, lead generation, how to choose a website design agency, and when to approach a redesign. For a broader perspective, start with five key elements of a law firm website.
