Short answer: A Missouri lawyer website redesign carries a risk most states do not create: Missouri is a prescribed-wording state, and verbatim disclaimers are a different engineering problem from a general duty not to mislead. A general duty survives a template change, because it lives in how the content reads. Exact wording lives in a specific element in a specific place, and a new theme has neither. This guide sets out how to carry prescribed language through a rebuild without paraphrasing it into uselessness.
A rule you satisfy by writing well survives a redesign. A rule you satisfy by reproducing a string does not.
What Missouri adds to a redesign
Missouri governs lawyer advertising through Rule 4-7.1 and the rules following it — note the numbering, which is cited as Rule 4-7.1 rather than Rule 7.1 — administered by the Office of Chief Disciplinary Counsel under the Supreme Court of Missouri. We cover the detail in the Missouri attorney advertising rules guide.
This guide does not reproduce any required wording, state where it must appear, or describe any filing, retention or exemption position. Those change, they are the expensive thing to get wrong from a template, and a marketing agency is the wrong source for them. Confirm the current text and placement with the Office of Chief Disciplinary Counsel or your ethics counsel.
What a marketing agency can usefully say is how prescribed wording behaves during a rebuild, and the answer is: badly, unless someone treats it as a build requirement.
Why exact wording breaks in a migration
Four mechanisms, and none of them involves anyone deciding to change anything.
It lived in the template. Required language is usually part of a footer, a header partial or a component attached to the results section rather than part of any page’s content. Migrate the content and it does not come with it. This is the most common failure and the easiest to prevent.
A designer improved it. Prescribed sentences read awkwardly, because they were drafted to be precise rather than elegant. Copy editors tidy them. A tightened, clearer, paraphrased version of a required string is no longer the required string.
The new layout shrank it. Where wording must be legible or conspicuous, a theme that renders footer text at ten pixels in light grey has changed something that matters, without changing a word.
It survived on some pages and not others. Rebuilds are done page type by page type. Practice area pages get the treatment; the results template, the landing pages and the bio template are done later by someone else.
| Where it lives now | What a rebuild does | What to specify instead |
|---|---|---|
| Footer partial | Replaced by theme footer | Named build requirement |
| Results page template | New template, no field | Defined area in the template |
| Inside page content | Usually survives | Verify after migration |
| Landing page builder | Rebuilt separately, often omitted | Same requirement, applied there |
| Hard-coded in a plugin | Plugin replaced | Move it somewhere durable |
Treat the string as an asset, not as copy
The practical method is to stop treating required language as text and start treating it as a controlled component.
Keep the current approved wording in one place — a single document, with the date it was confirmed and who confirmed it. Hand that document to the developer as a build requirement alongside the logo files, with an instruction that it is reproduced character for character and not edited by anyone. Specify which page types it appears on and roughly where, and make legibility a design requirement rather than an afterthought.
Then verify on staging, page type by page type, before the switch. A Missouri lawyer website redesign should not launch until someone has looked at a practice area page, a results page, a bio, the home page and any rebuilt landing page and confirmed the wording is present, exact and readable on a phone.
Then re-confirm, because the rebuild is a natural checkpoint
One further point that applies to prescribed-wording states specifically. The string you have been using may be the string that was correct when your last site was built. Requirements change, and nothing in a normal working year prompts anyone to check.
A rebuild is that prompt. Before the new site launches, confirm with the Office of Chief Disciplinary Counsel or your ethics counsel that the wording you are about to reproduce across a new website is the wording currently required. It is a single email, it takes a week, and it is considerably cheaper than discovering afterwards that a redesign propagated an out-of-date string onto ninety pages.
Missouri lawyer website redesign: frequently asked questions
Do required disclaimers survive a website redesign?
Frequently not, because they usually live in templates rather than in page content and a new theme brings its own templates. Treat required language as a named build requirement handed to the developer, and verify it on every page type before launch.
Can prescribed wording be reworded to read better?
Where wording is prescribed, a paraphrase is not the prescribed wording. This is the most common well-intentioned error in a rebuild, because the sentences read awkwardly and editors tidy them. Confirm the current required text with your ethics counsel and reproduce it exactly.
Why is Missouri cited as Rule 4-7.1 rather than Rule 7.1?
Missouri numbers its Rules of Professional Conduct within Rule 4, so the advertising provisions read as 4-7.1 and following. It matters when comparing guidance, because a checklist keyed to “Rule 7.1” will not match Missouri’s citations.
Where should disclaimers appear on a rebuilt site?
This guide does not state Missouri’s placement requirements. As a design matter, wording rendered in tiny light grey text at the foot of a page has been treated as something to dispose of rather than as a real element, and legibility on a phone is worth checking regardless.
How long does a Missouri lawyer website redesign take?
Eight to sixteen weeks. Add a week at the start to confirm current required wording, which is the step that prevents a rebuild propagating an out-of-date string across the whole site.
Missouri lawyer website redesign: the short version
If you take one thing from this guide, take this: before the rebuild starts, put your required wording in a single document with the date it was last confirmed. If nobody can tell you when that was, the redesign is about to copy a string of unknown vintage onto every page of a brand new website — and that is a much better problem to find now than later.
Official source: the Missouri Office of Chief Disciplinary Counsel.
Legal Web Agency is a marketing agency, not a law firm, and nothing here is legal advice. Nothing here reproduces or states Missouri’s required disclaimer wording, its placement, or any filing or retention requirement. Confirm current requirements with the Office of Chief Disciplinary Counsel or your ethics counsel.
Related reading: Law Firm Website Redesign: Complete 2026 Guide, plus the Missouri advertising rules guide and our law firm website content guide.
