Spoke
Responding to reviews
Your reply to a bad review is read by every prospect who scrolls that far, and it's often more persuasive than the praise above it. For a law firm it's also where a confidentiality breach is most likely to happen.
Response practice is our judgment from doing it, not documented platform behavior. The confidentiality constraint is a real obligation, flagged as needing your own counsel rather than settled here.
A bad review feels like damage. It's usually an opportunity, because it hands you something praise never does: a public stage, in front of exactly the people deciding whether to call you.
Prospects don't read reviews looking for perfection. They read to find out how you behave when something goes wrong. Your reply is the only direct evidence of that they'll ever get.
How should a business respond to a negative review?
Briefly, specifically, without getting defensive, and without disclosing anything confidential. Acknowledge the experience, say what standard you hold yourself to, and offer a direct way to continue privately. Then stop.
A thread arguing the facts in public reads as a business that can't take criticism, regardless of who's right. The reply is for the hundred people who'll read it later, not the one person who wrote it.
The pattern that works
Four sentences is usually enough.
- Thank them for raising it, without sarcasm.
- Acknowledge the experience without conceding facts you don't accept.
- Say what standard you hold yourself to. That's the part future readers are actually judging.
- Offer a direct route — a named person and a way to reach them.
The hard part is not rebutting. The instinct, especially when the review is unfair, is to correct the record. Correcting the record is satisfying to write and reads as a business relitigating a complaint in public.
The confidentiality trap
This is where law firms do real damage, and it happens fast.
Somebody says they were a client and describes their matter. The temptation is to reply with context — the dates, what was actually agreed, what they left out. Every one of those confirms the relationship and discloses something about it.
In regulated work you may not be free to confirm they were a client at all. That constraint doesn't evaporate because they disclosed it first.
A reply that says nothing specific:
We take concerns like this seriously and we'd like to understand what happened. Our policy prevents us from discussing any individual's dealings with us in public. Please contact [named person] at [channel] and we'll look into it properly.
Useful to future readers. Breaches nothing. Usable without a lawyer reading it first.
Replying to good reviews
Do it. Briefly. And not from a template.
Ten replies in a row saying "Thank you for your feedback! We appreciate your business!" tell a reader the account is automated and nobody's home. One sentence referencing something specific from the review does the opposite, takes fifteen seconds, and proves a human read it.
Don't ask for anything in the reply. A thank-you that pivots into a referral request turns a goodwill moment into a sales pitch, in public.
Running it
Reply within a few days. Fast enough to look attentive. Slow enough that you're not replying angry.
One owner, with a second person reading anything critical. The reply that causes a problem is almost always written alone and sent immediately.
Keep a short internal note of what actually happened, separate from the public reply. When the same complaint turns up three times, that's a process defect, not a reputation problem — and the notes are how you notice.
Don't mass-flag negatives. Flag what genuinely breaks platform policy: a competitor, a different business, abuse. Flagging honest criticism because you don't like it is a suppression practice, and suppression is one of the things the FTC rule reaches.
More in Reviews & reputation
Google reviews
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Fake reviews & removal
What to do about a review that's fraudulent, from a competitor, or just untrue — and the far more common situation where your real reviews are being filtered out and nobody told you.
Reddit & communities
Forum threads turn up constantly in search results and AI answers, which makes them a reputation surface whether you show up or not. They're also where faking it fails most publicly.
Glassdoor & employer reputation
Employer-review sites matter for hiring. The widely repeated claim that they're becoming a search ranking factor has nothing behind it. Both halves of that are worth saying out loud.
Yelp & directories
The platforms beyond Google each serve a different audience. Between them, they're where your old address, your old phone number and your old firm name are still being published to anyone who looks.
Review schema
Marking up reviews you collected about yourself, on your own site, is specifically not eligible for rich results. That single rule explains most of the review markup in the wild, and why it does nothing.
Multi-location reviews
What works for one office falls apart at twelve. The hard parts are knowing which office a review belongs to, giving each one an owner, and stopping head office writing all the replies.