BlackRain · The Legal Site
Internal spec · 2026-08-17
The inventory

What $200 a month actually buys.

Most of the value in this product is invisible on the page, which is exactly why it is hard to sell and easy to undercharge for. This is the list. Green is built and live today. Amber happens on the first yes. Grey is not built and should never be promised.

$200per month, legal rate. Or $2,000 a year, two months free. No setup fee.
No contractMonthly cancels any month. Annual is paid up front and not refundable. Never a 12-month term: we would not enforce it and a lawyer knows that.
They own itThe site and the domain stay theirs, always.
Builtlive right now First yesdone in week one Not builtnever promise this Leverwhat actually earns the gift, section 06
01

What the caller gets, which is where the cases come from.

A law firm does not have a marketing problem, it has a leak problem. Referrals google the firm and find nothing, and demand that already calls gets lost. Everything here plugs one of those two.

Built

The deadline clock

Someone picks what happened and the date it happened, and the page tells them roughly how long Connecticut gives them. Five limits, each cited on screen: negligence at two years with a three year outer limit, wrongful death two and five, written contracts six, spoken agreements three, and workplace discrimination at 300 days with the CHRO.

This is the only thing on the page that creates urgency in the client rather than in the lawyer. It turns "I should call someone sometime" into a call tonight. No competitor site in this state has it.
Built

Intake that qualifies itself

Name, number, best time, matter type, the date, what happened in their own words, and whether they have already spoken to another lawyer. It produces a written summary they can copy, email, or read down the phone.

The firm stops paying for the first five minutes of every call.
Built

The conflict question, asked first

Who else is involved: the other person, the company, the insurer. It is the first thing the form asks, before anything else.

An attorney will notice this in about four seconds, and it signals that whoever built the page understands how a law practice actually works.
Built

Tap to call everywhere, and tap to text

The number is reachable from the header, the hero, a sticky bar that never leaves the screen, the deadline result, and the contact block. A text link sits beside it.

Plenty of people will not make a phone call to a lawyer. They will send a text. Their current site offers neither.
Built

The referral handoff, for other attorneys

A second form aimed at lawyers, not clients. The referring attorney writes who they are, whether they want the matter back, the client, the parties to conflict check, and anything already on a clock. It produces a clean written handoff with the conflict line at the top.

Lawyers live on referrals from other lawyers, and those referrals almost always arrive as a voicemail with a name in it. This is the only thing on the page a competing attorney will personally use, which means it is the only thing that puts the question "who built this" in front of the exact people worth reaching.
Quoted separately

The lead alert: the intake texts the attorney in seconds

Goes to the ATTORNEY, not to his clients. BlackRain's own number, BlackRain's own A2P brand, one campaign. No per-firm registration, roughly thirteen dollars a month across a hundred clients. Not built yet.

Belongs IN the $200 once built. It costs almost nothing and it is the only thing a client feels every week, which makes it the retention mechanism. Do not sell it separately. Not to be confused with missed-call text-back, which is a different product.
Quoted separately

Missed-call text-back: the caller gets a text from the firm

Goes to THEIR clients. The firm is the sender of record, so it needs that firm's own A2P brand registration, their EIN aged at least fifteen days, a reseller ID, and a live opt-in page a carrier can load. Days of lead time, and it can be rejected.

Rung three, $2,500 to $3,000 plus $497 a month. The registration burden is not an obstacle to the sale, it is the justification for the price, and it is the reason this can never be bundled into $200 even if you wanted to.
Built

FAQ structured data on the Connecticut deadlines

The five limits are published as machine-readable questions and answers, each with its statute, generated from the same source as the clock so the two cannot drift apart.

This is the AEO foundation. Answer engines quote what is easy to extract, and a cited set of state deadlines is the only genuinely quotable thing a small firm's site has. The measurement service is menu #43 and is quoted separately.
02

The engineering nobody sees, which is most of what they are paying for.

Built

Twenty kilobytes, four requests, under a second

Hand written. System fonts, so nothing is downloaded to draw type. No framework, no libraries, no external requests of any kind.

Measured, not claimed. The build refuses to ship a page over 60KB.
Built

No third party watching his clients

Zero trackers, zero pixels, zero embedded widgets. Compare that to a rented site loading an accessibility overlay, an analytics tag, a review widget and a social pixel before it shows anyone a phone number.

For a law firm this is not a performance point, it is a confidentiality point. Someone researching a divorce should not be followed around the internet afterwards.
Built

Structured data, so Google understands the firm

Attorney schema in the page head: name, phone, address, area served, the attorneys, the practice areas. Only fields the firm can actually source.

Invisible to a human, load bearing for a search engine.
Built

Accessibility built in, not bolted on

Semantic markup, real labels, 44 pixel tap targets, nothing under 12 pixels, keyboard reachable, motion preferences respected.

The overlay widgets their competitors run are widely criticised and have themselves attracted complaints. Ours needs no widget because the page is built right.
Built

The build refuses to lie

Every fact on the page carries a source. If a field has no source, the build drops it rather than filling the gap. Missing biography means a shorter page, never an invented sentence.

The reason his page has no fake awards, no stock photography of a courthouse, and no made up founding year.
03

The compliance layer, which is the part a template shop cannot sell him.

Built

A mechanical CT RPC 7.2 and 7.4 gate

The build refuses to publish copy containing specialist, expert, guarantee, best, top rated, leading, or a dollar or percentage result without the disclaimer beside it.

Not a promise to be careful. The page will not build.
Built

The advertising block, always rendered

Attorney Advertising, the general information disclaimer, no attorney client relationship, past results do not guarantee a similar outcome, and the named Connecticut admitted attorney responsible for the content.

First yes

The quarterly archive, kept three years

A snapshot of the live site every quarter, retained for the period the rules expect, so the firm can show what its advertising said on any date.

No template shop offers this. It is the single line that most makes an attorney feel this vendor knows his rules and not just his industry.
04

The service, which is what the monthly fee is actually for.

Built

Changes by text, done the same day

He texts what he wants changed. It is changed. Every edit is a field and a rebuild, so there is no ticket, no quote, and no waiting on a queue.

This is the real product. The site is the artefact, the responsiveness is the subscription.
First yes

His domain, pointed and live

The site moves onto his own domain, the search engine block comes off, and the domain stays in his name.

First yes

Google Business Profile claimed and corrected

Categories, practice areas, hours, photos, and the same name, address and phone across Google, Justia, Avvo and the bar listing.

For a firm with no website, being findable produces more cases than being handsome does. Recommended as included at $200 rather than sold separately.
First yes

The monthly numbers note

On the first of each month: how many people looked, how many tapped the number, how many sent the form, and which page was busiest. One short message.

Invisible work is a cancelled retainer. Roughly seventy percent of clients never send a single change request, so the change channel alone only reaches the noisy third. This note reaches everyone, and it is where every upsell is born.
Not built

Spanish, practice area pages, town pages, the reviews engine

All sensible, none built. The reviews engine belongs in the paid tier above this one, not in the $200.

05

Against what he has now.

 A rented template siteThis
Page weightOne to four megabytesTwenty kilobytes
Outside servers involvedTwenty or moreNone
Who owns itUsually the agency, check the footerThe firm, in writing
A changeA ticket, a queue, sometimes a feeA text message, same day
Bar complianceThe firm's problemA gate in the build
Advertising archiveNoneQuarterly, kept three years
IntakeA contact form, if anyA qualifying intake with the conflict question
ContractTwelve to thirty six monthsNone. Cancel any month
Say it in his language. He is not buying a website. He is buying the page a referral sees before deciding whether to call, and an intake that stops costing him billable hours. The page is the receipt for that, not the product.
06

What actually earns the thank-you note.

Worth being blunt about, because it is not on the feature list above. A professional sends you a gift for one of three reasons, and only one of them is buildable.

The lever

You made him money he can point at

Not traffic. Not impressions. A specific call, on a specific date, that became a specific matter. The month he can match a signed fee to a call that came off the site is the month the relationship changes.

This is what attribution is for, and it is the reason the monthly numbers note matters more than any section on the page. Everything else here is set dressing next to a countable case.
The lever

You gave him back an hour he hated

Solo attorneys do their own intake, their own follow-up, and their own chasing of documents. Every one of those is billable time spent on something nobody pays for.

The qualifying intake is the first bite of this. The rest is rung three.
The lever

You made him look good to other lawyers

Status inside the profession is referral currency. A page a peer notices, and a referral handoff that peer actually uses, does more for the relationship than anything the client ever sees.

The only one of the three that a front end can deliver, and the reason the referral form exists.
The habit

You fixed something before he asked

Noticing that the bar listing has the old suite number and correcting it unprompted is worth more than a feature release. It is also free.

Not code. An operating habit, and the one that most reliably produces the unprompted thank-you.
The honest shape of it. Gratitude at that level comes from sixty days of being obviously useful, with a receipt at the end of each month. It does not come from a launch, and no feature ships it. Close one, serve him past the point that is reasonable, and show him the numbers on the first.
07

The arithmetic, which is the whole close.

$200 a month, or $2,000 paid yearly. One signed client covers it several times over.

That is the entire justification and it does not need dressing up. The question is never whether the site is worth $2,000. It is whether it produces one client a year that would otherwise have gone to the firm whose page loaded first and answered fastest.

Which is why the honest thing to keep building is not a prettier page. It is the speed to lead text, the Google profile, and the monthly note. Those decide the answer.