Someone types “family lawyer near me” into ChatGPT. They want a firm that exists in that city and actually does that work. They do not want a national brand with a city name bolted onto a landing page.
Law firm sites are long. Practice-area pages multiply. The model still needs four facts it can lift: firm name, city, phone, website. A practice area in plain words helps. A wall of schema that never appears as text does not.
Keep the file narrower than the brochure
One firm file. Location files for other offices. Person files only for lawyers you want named as people, tied back to the firm. Do not invent a Wikipedia page for a three-partner shop. Association with the city and the area of law is the honest path.
Gold is $297 a year after the website is proved. It can carry a public registration number the owner supplied. It is not a ranking in a legal directory.