Headshots for lawyers, for the firm bio page

The photo on the firm page, not the one from the deposition

A lawyer's photograph is read in three places and each one asks something slightly different. The firm's bio page shows it large, at the top of a paragraph about your practice areas, and a client who has already decided to call is checking that you look like someone who returns calls. A bar or legal directory shows it small, in a list, where it is competing with forty other faces and the only thing that survives is the outline and the expression. A pitch deck shows it on a team slide beside three colleagues, where what matters is whether the four of you look like one firm.

None of those is served by the photograph most lawyers have, which is either a decade old or a crop from a conference. An old photograph does not read as modest. It reads as something not kept up, on a page whose entire job is to suggest that things are kept up.

One consistent look across every lawyer in the firm

The failure a bio page makes visible is not a bad portrait, it is eight good portraits that disagree: two on white, three on grey, one outdoors, one cropped from a wedding. The eye reads the inconsistency before it reads any of the faces, and the page looks assembled rather than commissioned.

Fixing that means fixing the backdrop, the light and the wardrobe for everybody at once, which is what the team product does — one company look chosen once, then applied to each person, priced per person so the associate who starts in March costs the same as the partners did in January. If you are buying for one, this page is the right one; if you are buying for a bio page, that one is.

Neutral backdrops that match an existing site

Most firm sites were designed around one of three grounds: a white or near-white field, a mid-grey, or a dark charcoal used behind a photograph with the name in white type over it. All three are in the set, along with a softly blurred office and window light for the pages that use a warmer treatment, so a new photograph can be dropped into a template that already exists rather than forcing a redesign.

Two things to avoid, both common. A charcoal suit against a charcoal ground merges into one shape at directory size — pick the contrast, not the colour you like. And a photograph cropped very tight leaves the web team nothing to work with when the template changes; the wider frames in the set exist for exactly that, and they cost nothing extra to keep.