A data broker ranks for one in four regulated legal professionals
We searched for all 9,169 people on five public registers. LinkedIn ranks for 72% of them, Facebook for 38%, and contact-scraping sites for 26% — about as often as their own firm's page about them, which ranks for 21%.
By Rose Traviss · 28 September 2026
Every person on these registers is authorised by a regulator to do work it is often a criminal offence to do unauthorised. Their name is a matter of public record. So: when somebody searches that name, what do they find?
We bought one Google search for each of the 9,169 people on the five registers this site collects, and read all ten results for every one. Nobody appears to have measured this for these professions before.
What ranks
| Domain | Share of the 9,169 | Mean rank |
|---|---|---|
| linkedin.com | 72.2% | 4.5 |
| facebook.com | 37.9% | 5.3 |
| rocketreach.co (data broker) | 17.2% | 4.9 |
| instagram.com | 9.6% | 5.7 |
| legal500.com | 8.6% | 5.4 |
| lexology.com | 8.6% | 5.4 |
| clsb.info (a regulator) | 7.5% | 4.0 |
| reviewsolicitors.co.uk | 6.9% | 4.5 |
| aeroleads.com (data broker) | 6.0% | 6.1 |
| trustpilot.com | 4.1% | 5.6 |
Counting every contact-scraping site together — RocketReach, AeroLeads, Wiza, ZoomInfo, Apollo, SignalHire, Lusha and the rest, whose business is selling contact details for people who did not publish them — one in four regulated legal professionals has at least one in their first ten results. 2,376 of 9,169.
For patent and trade mark attorneys it is nearly a third: 32.4%.
Their own firm’s page about them ranks for 20.5% — so a regulated professional is about as likely to have a data broker in their first ten results as a page their own employer wrote about them.
What that means by profession
| Profession | People | No results at all | Only other people’s pages | Own firm page | A data broker | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Patent and trade mark attorneys | 3,924 | 3.5% | 4.7% | 42.7% | 63.6% | 32.4% |
| Licensed conveyancers | 2,428 | 3.7% | 4.2% | 2.7% | 59.2% | 29.3% |
| Certificated enforcement agents | 1,211 | 10.1% | 9.1% | 0.2% | 34.8% | 10.6% |
| Costs lawyers | 789 | 0.3% | 12.0% | 17.2% | 65.9% | 30.9% |
| Notaries public | 817 | 23.5% | 1.6% | 0.5% | 4.9% | 2.4% |
“Only other people’s pages” means every result was a directory, a social network, a data broker or a regulator — the person has a search presence made entirely of things other people wrote about them.
Two professions stand out in opposite directions. Patent and trade mark attorneys are the most visible: 42.7% have a page on their own firm’s site, which is what you would expect of a profession concentrated in large firms with marketing budgets. Licensed conveyancers are the most invisible relative to their size: 59.2% have a LinkedIn profile and 2.7% have a page on their firm’s website. They are two thirds as numerous as the attorneys and a sixteenth as likely to have an employer page about them.
The notary figures come with a warning and should not be read as a finding. The Faculty Office publishes 772 of its 817 notaries as an initial and a surname — “Mr A Smith” — so the query for most of them was weak by construction. A 23.5% zero-result rate measures the register’s naming convention, not the profession’s web presence. That distinction is on methodology and it is the reason those rows are flagged in the data rather than quietly averaged in.
The finding that corrected us
Before this, the site said in four separate files that IPReg — the only regulator here that publishes a page per registrant — must therefore already rank for its registrants’ names, so a page here would compete with the regulator’s rather than fill a gap.
The measurement says the opposite.
| Regulator | Per-person pages? | Appears in results for |
|---|---|---|
| IPReg | Yes, 3,924 of them | 0.3% of its register |
| CLSB | No — one table | 87% of its register |
675 of the CLSB’s 687 appearances are a single URL: the register page itself, which ranks for the names of hundreds of different people because they are all in its markup. IPReg’s 3,924 individual pages appear ten times between them, and only two of those ten are per-attorney pages.
Publishing a URL per person and being findable are different things, and the second does not follow from the first. The patent attorneys piece now carries the correction.
Reviews, and a duty nobody here owes
1,013 of the results carried a star rating. Trustpilot holds 396 of them, ReviewSolicitors 135, Facebook 72, Yelp 39.
The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 imposes a duty to take reasonable steps to verify that published consumer reviews are genuine. That duty falls on whoever publishes them. This site publishes none, carries none, and is not going to — which is a positioning decision as much as a compliance one, and it is written down at about.
What the public actually asks
Google showed a “People also ask” box against 1,616 of the searches, with 2,236 distinct questions. The commonest are not the ones a regulator would write:
| Question | Times shown |
|---|---|
| Is a patent lawyer a real lawyer? | 130 |
| What’s the difference between a conveyancer and a licensed conveyancer? | 102 |
| Who is the best patent attorney in the UK? | 64 |
| What is the highest paid patent attorney? | 58 |
| How much does a patent lawyer usually cost? | 33 |
| What does a European patent attorney do? | 30 |
“Is a patent lawyer a real lawyer” is the second most-shown question against the names of 3,924 people who are, in the sense the question is asking, regulated to conduct litigation — 91% of them hold a litigation certificate. The answer is on patent and trade mark attorneys and in who may do what.
And the same question about the firms
We then bought one search for each of the 1,631 firms whose website the person sweep could not resolve — a firm needs two practitioners on these registers before the first method can run at all, and 1,091 of them have one.
That took the firms with a known website from 297 to 1,265 of 1,712 (74%). 149 firms returned no results whatsoever. What ranks for a firm’s own name, on the same measurement as the names above:
| Domain | Share of 1,631 firm searches |
|---|---|
| linkedin.com | 46.0% |
| facebook.com | 18.4% |
| Companies House | 18.0% |
| reviewsolicitors.co.uk | 14.3% |
| cylex-uk.co.uk | 11.3% |
| yell.com | 9.4% |
| endole.co.uk | 8.0% |
A firm is a business and its name is a trading name, so the directory presence here is less surprising than it is for an individual. The number worth keeping is the other one: a quarter of the firms that employ these practitioners have no website this could find at all.
Method: one Google search per person via Serper, September 2026, ten results
each, query built from the name plus the firm or town the register gives.
Reproducible from serp_analysis.py; the full tables are in
data/serp_analysis.md. No result text is republished here — these are counts
of where results came from, not the results.