Schema Markup for Law Firms: What Still Matters in 2026

Short answer: Use LegalService (or ProfessionalService) for the firm with sameAs links to every directory profile, Person for each attorney, FAQPage on question content, Article on guides and BreadcrumbList on inner pages. Link them with one @id per entity. Stop relying on the deprecated Attorney type and never mark up self-written reviews.

Why does schema matter more now, not less?

Google removed FAQ rich results for most sites in 2023 and deprecated the Attorney type in 2024, so many firms concluded structured data was over. AI engines went the other way. They use schema to confirm what kind of thing a page is about, which entity it belongs to and how that entity connects to profiles they already trust. A firm with clean, linked schema is easier to cite than one without.

The firm

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": ["LegalService", "ProfessionalService"],
  "@id": "https://yourfirm.com/#organization",
  "name": "Sample Family Law, APC",
  "url": "https://yourfirm.com",
  "telephone": "+1-818-555-0142",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "123 N Brand Blvd, Ste 200",
    "addressLocality": "Glendale",
    "addressRegion": "CA",
    "postalCode": "91203",
    "addressCountry": "US"
  },
  "areaServed": [{ "@type": "City", "name": "Glendale" }, { "@type": "City", "name": "Burbank" }],
  "knowsLanguage": ["English", "Armenian"],
  "sameAs": [
    "https://www.avvo.com/attorneys/...",
    "https://www.martindale.com/...",
    "https://apps.calbar.ca.gov/attorney/Licensee/Detail/..."
  ]
}

Each attorney

{
  "@type": "Person",
  "@id": "https://yourfirm.com/attorneys/jane-doe#person",
  "name": "Jane Doe",
  "jobTitle": "Founding Attorney",
  "worksFor": { "@id": "https://yourfirm.com/#organization" },
  "alumniOf": "Loyola Law School",
  "sameAs": ["https://www.linkedin.com/in/...", "https://www.avvo.com/attorneys/..."]
}

Question content

Keep FAQPage on every page with questions even though the rich result is gone. Engines extract question-and-answer pairs from it, and the visible text must match.

Guides and articles

Article with headline, datePublished, dateModified, an author that points at a Person @id, and a publisher that points at the organization @id. Freshness is a citation signal; keep dateModified honest.

Rules that matter

1. One @id per entity, reused everywhere. Two ids for the firm reads as two firms.
2. sameAs must point at profiles that carry the same name and phone. Fix the profiles first, then link them.
3. Mark up only what is visible. Engines compare markup to page text.
4. Validate after every change with the Rich Results Test and the Schema.org validator.
5. Do not paste a different organization block on every page. Emit it once in the layout and reference it by @id.

What to stop doing

• Attorney as the only type. Deprecated; use LegalService.
• Review or AggregateRating authored by the firm. Google treats self-serving reviews as spam.
• Sitelinks search box markup. Deprecated November 2024.
• LocalBusiness at addresses that are not staffed offices.

Two shortcuts

The law firm schema generator produces the firm and attorney blocks above from a form. The schema guide PDF is the same material for forwarding to whoever manages your site. If you want to know whether the schema you already have is helping, the free AI visibility check scores it from the outside.