Celebration: National Cheese Day—“a day to celebrate cheese.”
Happy National Cheese Day.
Today we’re celebrating the good kind of cheese—and calling out the bad kind, the kind clogging up nearly every family law website in America.
You know the lines. “Professional, dedicated, and compassionate.” “Aggressive representation you can trust.” “Committed to excellence.”
Cheese. Melted, generic, indistinguishable cheese. And our new data proves it’s costing you.
When we coded all 4,359 reviews in the study, the single largest language cluster wasn’t a differentiator at all.
It was generic enthusiasm—“great,” “amazing,” “excellent,” “fantastic,” “best”—appearing in 1,353 reviews. It’s the biggest cluster in the dataset and the least useful. Clients reach for those words when they lack more specific language.
The word “professional” alone appeared in 692 reviews, making it the most common single descriptor in the entire pool—and at the AAML credential level, it communicates almost nothing. It’s table stakes. Expected. Inert.
Here’s the trap. Attorneys read their own five-star reviews, see “professional” and “great” over and over, and conclude those words are their brand. So they put them on the homepage.
But every competitor is doing the exact same thing, which means the reader’s eye glazes over before they reach your phone number.
You’ve spent your most valuable real estate—the hero block—on cheese everyone else is also serving.
The fix is to anchor every claim to something specific. “Knowledgeable” is cheese.
“Knowledgeable in high-conflict custody involving parental alienation” is a steak.
“Experienced” is cheese. “Seventeen years in contested cases with business assets in the marital estate” is a reason to call.
The knowledge and expertise cluster showed up in 977 reviews—second largest in the set—which means clients do care about competence. They just can’t tell your generic version apart from anyone else’s.
Specificity is what converts the abstract into the believable.
And while you’re trimming the cheese, replace it with the language clients actually used about you.
Pull your last twenty five-star reviews into one document. Highlight every concrete, specific phrase. Cross out every generic word.
What remains is your copy bank—already written, already validated, already in your clients’ own words.
If a client called you “a stabilizing force” or said you were the reason they “could finally sleep at night,” that line belongs in your headline, not buried three scrolls down on the about page.
The two-pole move works beautifully here, too: pair one calm word with one fighting word. “Patient counsel. Relentless advocacy.” “Steady. Strategic. No-nonsense.” That contrast does in five words what a paragraph of cheese can’t—it signals range, and it sticks.
So celebrate the cheese on your charcuterie board today.
Then go look at your homepage and ask the hard question: how many of these words has every other family law firm in town already used? Cross them out.
What’s left is either nothing—which tells you how much ground you’re leaving on the table—or it’s the start of marketing that finally sounds like you.
The market is full of “professional.” It’s starving for specific.
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