How we build and check listings

A coach or coaching firm whose own site offers coaching to lawyers as a stated focus: a title, a headline, a services page or a page written for lawyers says it coaches lawyers, attorneys, law students, legal professionals or law firm owners.

The coach is based in the United States, or the site states no location and nothing on it places the coach outside the United States.

A coaching firm gets one listing. A coach on a firm’s team also gets a listing of their own when their bio page on the firm’s site is about them and passes the same test on its own words.

• Anyone who recruits or places lawyers for employers: legal recruiters and search firms, and coaches or coaching firms that also recruit lawyers. A former recruiter who now coaches is listed.
• Therapists and counselors who offer no coaching service.
• Law firms, and training or continuing legal education companies that offer no one-on-one coaching.
• Marketing and business services agencies, and writers who only write resumes.
• General coaches who name lawyers only as one profession among many.
• Coaches whose only coaching for lawyers is trial skills or public speaking. They are not listed until the directory has a specialty for that work.
• Coaches based outside the United States, and sites that are parked or no longer work.
• Other directories of coaches.
• Voll Recruiting, whose parent company runs this site. It is never listed as a coach.

• The coach’s own website. Profiles, services pages, pricing pages and bio pages on the coach’s own site.
• Public rosters that list the coach, such as the coach lists kept by bar and professional associations and law schools. A profile names each roster that lists the coach and links to it. Rosters never change the order of a list.
• Never LinkedIn. We do not fetch or copy LinkedIn. A profile links to a LinkedIn page only when the coach’s own site links to it.
• Leads, not sources. Videos, news stories, conference programs and other directories can point us to a coach, but no fact is taken from them.

We do not copy headshots or other images. Every listing shows a monogram of the coach’s initials instead.

Each fact on a listing comes from a page on the coach’s own website or a public roster, with a short quote of at most 200 characters. A coach’s headline is their own description of their work, quoted word for word, at most 160 characters. Specialties, the clients a coach works with, credentials and background each need their own quote: a specialty is listed only when the coach’s site says they work on it.

Where a coach is based comes only from the coach’s own words. A listing names the state that the page names. When the page names a city but no state, the listing names that city’s state only if the city is on a short, fixed list of major US cities whose names no other US city of note shares, such as Chicago and Houston, and the site gives no address or base in another state. That list does not apply to a city name that several states share, such as Portland, or to a page that places the coach in a city’s suburbs, in the area around a city or in a metro region that spans states: those give no state.

Quotes keep the coach’s own words and capitalization, with one change: a long dash between words is printed as a hyphen with a space on each side, because this site uses no long dashes.

A script copies every quote from the page’s own text and checks it there. Where judgment is needed, such as which sentence supports a specialty, a language model may choose among sentences the script has already cut from the page; it never writes a quote, a name or a number, and a fact that fails the script’s check is dropped, not repaired.

We show no ratings or reviews, because we cannot verify who wrote them or whether they describe real clients. No coach can pay for a place in any list or for a review.

A listing is verified when the coach claims it and confirms its facts. A verified listing shows the Verified seal, and verified listings come first in every list. A listing that has not been claimed says so on its profile: it was built from the coach’s public pages. Verification is free, and every fact on a verified listing still needs a public page that states it, on the coach’s own site or a public roster that lists the coach.

We record credentials as the coach’s own site states them. We do not confirm them with the bodies that award them, so check any credential that matters to you with its issuer.

Each profile shows the date we last read the coach’s site, and every page that counts listings shows when those counts were computed. When we read a coach’s site again, we update the listing and its date.

Every number about coaches on the site, such as a count or a price range, is computed from the listings each time the site is built. Nothing is estimated or typed in by hand.

• A price is shown only when the coach publishes it, with its unit: per session, per hour, per month, per package or per program. Each coach counts once per kind of price, at the lowest price they publish.
• A price range or median needs at least 3 listings that show that kind of price. Medians and percentiles are prices a coach actually published (the nearest rank), never an average of two prices. Counts of prices say how many listings show one: a coach’s own pages may state a price the listing does not show.
• A specialty page is published once at least 5 listings name that specialty, and a state page once at least 3 coaches are based in that state. A page that has been published stays up while at least one listing still qualifies for it; if none does, its address forwards to the matching filtered list of coaches.
• Any other number in a guide, such as a survey figure, links to its source with a short quote.

Coaches can claim or correct their listing, or ask to be added, at no cost. Every change needs a page on the coach’s own website that states it, and we check that page before we change the listing.

A coach can also ask us to remove their listing; no page or reason is needed. We check that the request comes from the coach, then remove the listing within seven days. The listing stays off: it is not added again, and our crawler stops reading the coach’s site, or only their bio page if their listing comes from a coaching firm’s site.

A person named on a coaching firm’s team page can ask the same way to have their name taken off the firm’s listing, with or without a listing of their own. We check that the request comes from that person, then take the name off within seven days, and it is not added again. The firm stays listed.

We read coaches’ sites with a crawler that names itself in every request, links to this page, and obeys robots.txt: a Disallow rule for LegalCareerCoachesBot, or for all crawlers, keeps it off those pages. It sends no more than two requests at a time to any one site, keeps a copy of each page it reads so every quote can be checked against the page as it was read, and never fetches LinkedIn. It stops reading the site of any coach who asks us to remove their listing, or only their bio page if their listing comes from a coaching firm’s site.