Reign for law firms. Legal practice community and resources.

Reign is the WordPress theme for building a complete community site: social network, courses, member directory, marketplace and job board on one install. A firm uses the member directory for its team, plus gated resources.

BuddyNext supplies attorney profiles with practice-area fields and private spaces. Jetonomy gives you a Q and A space with accepted answers, voting and a moderation queue, with private spaces available as a visibility option. Learnomy can host fixed-fee guidance or templates as lessons with Stripe or PayPal checkout, if the firm sells them. BuddyNext Pro adds paid plans and gated spaces for a subscription advice service.

The BuddyPress Community Bundle kit is the packaged route if your stack is BuddyPress, and the membership site build guide explains gated areas. The plugins page shows the free and Pro split, and Reign is a flat theme licence.

A prospective client searches for a problem, reads a guide at night and decides whether to call. They may read two or three pages, look at the profile of the attorney who wrote it and send an enquiry the next morning.

An existing client uses the portal to find a document or an update without emailing to ask. Adoption depends entirely on whether the portal is faster than email, so keep it simple and put documents in obvious places.

The firm's week is about keeping content current: updating a guide after a change in the law, adding a new one for a question that came up repeatedly and checking that private spaces still have the right people in them.

A guide earns its place when it helps a stranger understand their situation and decide what to do next. It should sound like a calm colleague explaining, not like a leaflet. Firms that write this way bring in better-qualified enquiries, because readers arrive already knowing what the matter involves.

Choose topics from real calls. List the questions your reception and your lawyers hear most, and write one guide per question. Use the words clients use, such as what happens if my landlord will not return my deposit, rather than the formal name of the area of law.

Structure each guide the same way. Begin with a short answer, then explain the steps, the usual time frames in general terms, the documents people need and the points where they should get advice. End with who to contact and what to bring to a first call.

Be clear about limits. State that the guide is general information, that the law changes and that it is not advice on a particular matter. Follow your regulator's rules on content and advertising, and have a partner review each guide before it goes live.

Keep guides current. Add the date it was last checked, and set a reminder to review each one. An outdated guide damages trust more than having no guide at all, and an updated one earns repeat visits.

If your firm's work is entirely bespoke, a public content library and a simple contact page will serve you better than a members area. If you are a nonprofit legal clinic, see the nonprofits page.

If you need case management, billing and document assembly, buy a legal practice product and link to it from the site.