TL;DR
Both are criminal defence and on a website they are usually the same page. As businesses they share almost nothing. A DWI client decides in an evening, on a phone. A federal client researches for weeks, often before charges are filed. Length is right for one and wrong for the other.
Both are criminal defence. On a website they are usually the same page. As businesses they have almost nothing in common, and treating them as one thing is why so many defence sites read as generic.
The difference runs through everything: how the client searches, how long they take to decide, what they need to read, and what evidence of competence they will accept.
How the client arrives
DWI. Fast, high volume, mostly mobile, often within a day or two of the arrest. The search is the charge plus the place. The person is anxious but the situation is comprehensible. They know roughly what a DUI is, they want to know what happens now.
Federal. Slow, low volume, and frequently the search starts before any charge exists: a target letter, a subpoena, a visit from agents. The queries are different in kind: not “federal defence lawyer” but the specific situation. The person may research for weeks and consult several firms.
One of those is a decision made in an evening. The other is a decision made over a month with a family involved.
What that changes on the site
DWI pages should be fast, direct and mobile-first. Deadlines up top. The DMV hearing window is the classic one and it is genuinely urgent. Short paragraphs. A phone number that works with a thumb. Nobody facing a DUI reads three thousand words at eleven at night.
Federal pages should be long, and it is the one place I would say that without hedging. Somebody deciding who defends them against a federal indictment will read everything you have written. Depth is the trust signal. This is the opposite of my usual position on length and it is the audience that justifies it.
The evidence each audience accepts
DWI clients behave like ordinary local consumers. They read reviews. BrightLocal’s 2026 survey of 1,002 US adults found 97% read reviews for local businesses and 31% will only use one rated 4.5 or above, and a DWI client is comfortable leaving one afterwards, because the outcome is a relief rather than something to bury.
Federal clients accept almost none of that. They want to know which courts you are admitted to, whether you have tried a case in that district, what you have published, whether you have been a prosecutor. The substitutes for testimony matter far more at that end of the docket.
Which produces the pattern I wrote about in the parent post: review volume tracks charge severity inversely. The firms with the most reviews are usually doing the least serious work.
The map pack splits them too
DWI is a local pack business. Distance matters, proximity matters, the profile matters.
Federal is not. The relevant court may be a hundred miles away and the client will travel or hire remotely. Optimising a federal practice for the local pack is effort spent in the wrong competition entirely. the website and the pack are two different contests and federal lives almost entirely in the first.
Google’s local ranking guidance makes the reason plain: the pack weighs relevance, distance and prominence, and distance is “how far each business is from the customer who’s searching.” For a federal client that measurement is close to meaningless, because they are not choosing a lawyer by driving time, so the entire mechanism the DWI side depends on simply does not apply.
What I would actually do
- Decide which practice the site is for. Most firms do both and lead with neither, which is how you get a home page that says “aggressive representation” and nothing else. Lead with the one that pays the bills and give the other its own properly built section.
- Do not share templates between them. A federal page built on the DWI template will be too short and too transactional. A DWI page built on the federal template will bury the deadline under nine hundred words.
- Separate the intake. A DWI enquiry needs answering in minutes. A federal enquiry needs a conversation. Same form, same phone tree, and one of them is being handled wrong.
The short version
- Two businesses wearing one label.
- DWI: fast, mobile, deadline-driven, decided in an evening.
- Federal: slow, researched, often pre-charge, decided over weeks.
- Length is right for federal and wrong for DWI. The audience decides, not a rule.
- DWI clients read and leave reviews. Federal clients read credentials.
- DWI is a map pack business. Federal is not.
- Different templates, different intake. Sharing them means one is handled wrong.
If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. Criminal defense SEO covers both ends of the docket. If you’re not sure which of several plausible problems is costing you, that’s what an SEO audit is for.
