How we work with law firms and wealth advisers.
Clarion builds the public record of a professional-services firm: the website, the structured data underneath it, and the body of published work that search engines and AI assistants read before they name anyone. Law firms come first, including large firms with offices in several cities. Registered investment advisers and wealth managers come second.
The studio has one principal, Mark Nelson, in Lynden, Washington. The reference for the standard described on this page is kraus.law, a 426-page build for a corporate and M&A partner in Texas.
How clients find a lawyer now.
For most of the last thirty years, being found online meant ranking on the first page of search results. Ranking rewarded years of accumulated links, so the same firms held the first page whatever the quality of the work behind it.
A growing share of clients now ask an AI assistant first. The answer is written out before anyone clicks, and it names its sources. The engines quote what they can check: a bar admission linked to the regulator's own record, a dataset with a date on it, a statute citation that resolves. Visibility used to be measured by rank. It is now also measured by citation in those answers.
Most firm websites were built for the older system. A partner's bar admissions appear as a line of text with nothing behind them. A site assembled by JavaScript in the browser reads as blank to the AI crawlers, which fetch the code without running it. The distance between what a firm knows and what a machine can verify about it is what we call the translation gap.
No one can tell a firm what an engine will cite. The engines decide. What we build is the record they check.
A legal knowledge platform with a law firm attached.
A firm's site can be the place its field goes for reference material. That takes knowledge assets: trackers, datasets, glossaries and tools that practitioners return to and cite. These belong to the firm. The lawyer who builds one puts their byline on it, and the asset stays with the firm when people move on.
Individual partners can also have sites in their own names. Each carries the partner's verified record, their practice described in their clients' words, and their own writing, and each points at the firm on every page. A partner site links to the firm's knowledge assets and never hosts one.
At kraus.law the knowledge layer is a performance report over 131 published Texas Business Court opinions, four trackers with downloadable data, judge pages built from the judges' own standing orders, and a 318-term glossary with statutory citations. It was built for one partner's practice. For a firm, the same kind of asset lives on the firm's domain.
What sits under every page.
The visible site is quiet. The work is in the layer a reader never sees and a machine reads first. The full specification is walked through in How AI Verifies You're Real.
Each lawyer is a named person in the structured data. Each bar admission links to the regulator that issued it, and an inactive admission is marked inactive. An adviser's site links the firm's own SEC record.
The firm, its offices, its practice groups and its people are entities in a single graph, each pointing to the others. A partner's site states which firm the partner works for and links to the firm's page for that partner.
Every page is served as finished HTML, so the crawlers that do not run JavaScript read all of it.
A robots.txt that names the AI crawlers and lets them in, an llms.txt, and a sitemap that lists the pages that actually exist.
Every page passes a check that stops a claim from reaching the site unless it is literally true of the person it describes. Every factual statement is checked against a primary source before it ships, and nothing goes live without the named lawyer's approval.
The advertising rules are part of the brief.
Lawyer advertising is regulated state by state. Each bar admission links to its own regulator, and the rules that apply are that state's. The firm's lawyers are the authority on those rules, and the process is built for their review: no "specialist" or "expert" language, no claim that is not the lawyer's own, and nothing live until the lawyer has read it.
For registered investment advisers, the SEC Marketing Rule has governed testimonials, endorsements, performance advertising and third-party ratings since November 2022. The firm's chief compliance officer joins from the first conversation, and templates are designed to clear review the first time. None of the builds on the work page has yet been through an adviser's compliance review.
The wealth-advisory work starts from research. In May 2026 Clarion audited 130 independent advisory firms drawn from the SEC's registrant feed, and not one linked its own SEC record from its website. The method, sample and findings are published in The AI Visibility Gap.
Built beside the systems you already run.
A firm runs on systems its people trust: intake, CRM, document management, the compliance archive. Those systems have owners whose job is to keep them running. Clarion does not replace them.
Where a page has to hand something to one of those systems, such as a contact form that delivers to the firm's intake or a published piece that must be kept in the compliance archive, we work with whoever owns that system and design the handoff with them.
Who we work with.
Clarion is a single-principal studio. The founder builds the work, so the studio takes a small number of engagements at a time. Large firms with many offices are welcome. For a firm that size, the firm's platform and its people's records come first, and partner sites follow. The reasoning behind the single-principal model is in Studio vs. the MSP.
We work with
- Law firms of any size, including large firms with offices in several cities
- Partners who want a site in their own name that points at their firm
- Registered investment advisers and wealth managers
- Other professional-services firms whose people are paid for judgment, where being the cited source in a field is worth real money
Not the right fit
- Firms looking for lead generation, paid media or a ranking promise
- Firms wanting schema added to an existing template site
- Contractors, consumer brands and nonprofits. Some builds on the work page are in those categories, and each came through a personal relationship.
- Anyone seeking the cheapest option
How an engagement runs.
Each phase has a defined output. The length depends on the number of lawyers and offices and on the depth of the knowledge layer. A single partner's site takes about six weeks from the first interview.
The firm owns the domain, the files, the content and the repository at launch, documented so another studio could maintain them.
The reference build.
kraus.law belongs to Chuck Kraus, the founder's brother-in-law. It was built at no charge as the studio's first law-firm build and is maintained under an annual agreement. Open it, view the source, and compare it with any firm site you know. The work page lists every build and how each client came to the studio.
Every engagement begins with a diagnostic conversation. No pitch. No slides. A structured assessment of what the machines can currently verify about your firm and your lawyers, and whether there's a fit.
Start a Conversation