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What can I safely say back to a bad review?

A reply that structurally cannot confirm anything about a client, plus a list of what it left out on purpose. Free, no account, and the review never leaves your browser.

This page needs JavaScript to draft a reply. Everything below explains what it would produce and why it is shaped that way.

There is no box for your side of the story. That is deliberate, and the reason is below.

143 / 4000
What you are willing to say publicly
What the review is about
How it reads
Reply A short public reply is available here, and the drafts below stay inside the envelope.
confirms you were a client denies you were a client any fact from the matter any digit you did not enter
A tinted container holding three stacked bars labeled Acknowledge, Firm policy and Public channel, with four gray chips outside it each crossed by one rule: confirms a client, denies a client, a case fact, a digit.
Every draft is these three rungs, in this order.
Posting this on Google
The length ceiling here is ours. The Google and Yelp rule pages we checked do not state a character limit for owner replies.
Short 0 words

Policy 0 words

Non-substantive 0 words

The opening sentence follows a sample in ABA Formal Opinion 496; the firm-name version is a plural adaptation.

What this reply does not say, and why
It does not confirm that anyone was your client.
It does not deny it either, because a denial says something too.
It contains no fact from any matter.
It contains no digit you did not type.
It does not argue with anything in the review.
It does not ask for the review to be changed or removed.
Before you post
Read it against your own state's rules of professional conduct.
Keep a fee dispute out of a public thread. Check whether your jurisdiction offers a fee dispute or arbitration program.
Asking the platform to take a review down is a separate process from replying to it.
An invitation to make contact only works if you mean to answer the phone.
If you are not sure, check whether your bar or disciplinary authority offers ethics guidance.

Whichever state licenses you, its rules of professional conduct control.

This is a drafting tool, not ethics advice.

How the review response generator works

Three rungs, and only one of them is written by a model.

The three rungs

Acknowledge, in the abstractThe first rung says feedback of this shape has been read. It's written about feedback in general, because the moment it becomes about the person who wrote the review, it has confirmed something.
Firm policy, never a case factThe middle rung is the one everybody gets wrong. On a plumber's page it carries a verified fact: the arrival window, the signed change order. Here it carries a bounded statement about why professional obligations limit a public response, pulled from a fixed list of sentences written in advance. No model selects it and no model can edit it. It says nothing about anybody.
A channel that is already publicThe third rung points at a line the office already publishes. ABA Formal Opinion 496 puts it plainly: lawyers may post an invitation to contact the lawyer privately to resolve the matter. Google's own policy allows a business to post its contact details in a reply, so the two rules agree here.

What the model is actually told

What the model gets is a fixed set of bounded values: which complaint shapes are in play, how the review reads, what tone you picked, and how many connective pairs to return.

It does not get the review. It does not get your practice area, your firm name, your phone number or your state. Open the network tab and check: the request body is a dozen words of JSON and none of them are yours. The complaint shapes, how the review reads, and the tone you choose are sent on to the model only to draft the reply; the text is not stored after the reply comes back.

Then a validator reads what came back. It rejects anything containing a digit, anything containing the words case, matter, client, court or settlement, anything that confirms or denies a relationship, anything that argues back, anything superlative, anything asking for the review to come down.

If the single response breaks a rule, it falls back immediately to sentences from the same fixed list. Either way you get a finished draft.

Who this is for

Solo and small-firm attorneys in the practice areas where clients arrive in crisis and the outcome is partly outside your control: family, criminal defense, personal injury, immigration, probate. The accountants and tax preparers in our directory sit in the same seat with the same problem and a different vocabulary.

The moment is specific. A one-star review is sitting at the top of your Google Business Profile, you know the matter, you know the review is misleading, and the most natural sentence in English would confirm in public that this person was your client.

It also covers the two reviews that are not from a client at all: one from the other side of a matter, and one from a person who has never contacted your office.

Attorney questions about responding to negative reviews

Can a lawyer respond to a bad review at all?

Yes, within a narrow shape. ABA Formal Opinion 496 says a lawyer who chooses to respond must not disclose anything relating to a client matter, and it names two restrained options: an invitation to make contact privately, and a line saying professional considerations preclude a response. What it does not permit is correcting the record with confidential information. That does not change just because the reviewer has already put the facts online.

Does responding confirm that the person was my client?

It can. "I'm sorry your case didn't go the way you hoped" publicly confirms a representation. So does "thank you for trusting us." The drafts here are built so that no sentence in them is about the reviewer at all.

Should I just ignore it?

Often, yes, and the opinion says so: lawyers should give serious consideration to not responding to negative online reviews in all situations. One mechanical reason sits behind that. Google notifies the reviewer when you reply, so a reply invites a second round. This page will tell you when it thinks silence is the safer move, and it will still show you the drafts if you want them.

What if the reviewer was never my client?

Formal Opinion 496 does say that where the poster is not a client or former client, a lawyer may respond by stating that. It also warns, in the next breath, that a lawyer must use caution with posts from nonclients: if the person is an opposing party or a relative of a former client, even a general denial can show that you were involved in the matter. This tool will not write that sentence for you in any branch, because it cannot check whether it is true. Pseudonyms exist, and a person who only ever had a consultation may still be owed duties.

Does this change from state to state?

The rules do, and that is exactly why the drafts do not. Formal Opinion 496 surveys the state opinions and they do not agree. Colorado's would allow a limited disclosure in some circumstances, and the ABA committee says outright that it disagrees. The District of Columbia's permits more, because its confidentiality rule is written differently. New Jersey's allows a lawyer to state disagreement with the facts. The drafts use the narrowest envelope in that survey. Your own state's rules of professional conduct control, so check the ethics guidance from your bar or disciplinary authority.

Can I use this for a Yelp review?

Yelp is the one to stop and check. Its content guidelines say you "shouldn't use third-party AI tools and chatbots to create reviews or other content, including using such tools to draft or revise content." The guideline does not name owner replies separately. Read the rule before you post, then write the reply in your own words.

Can I ask for the review to be taken down?

That is a separate process from your reply, and it goes to the platform, not to the reviewer. The opinion notes a lawyer may ask the host to remove a post, and that this is more likely to work when the poster is not a client. Two things to keep off the reply itself: any offer of anything of value in exchange for a change, which Google's own policy prohibits outright, and any threat. The FTC's rule on consumer reviews makes it unfair or deceptive to use an unfounded or groundless legal threat, a physical threat or intimidation to prevent a review or get it removed. It also covers a public false accusation made knowingly or recklessly for that purpose.

What about a fee dispute?

A public thread is the wrong venue and this page will say so when it sees one. Check whether your jurisdiction offers a fee dispute or fee arbitration program, and use that channel if it does.

Is anything I paste stored or sent anywhere?

No. The review is read by your own browser to guess what the complaint is about, and it stops there. It is not in the request, not in the address bar, not in storage. The request carries six keys and nothing you typed. There is also a switch under Advanced that builds the drafts with no request at all.

Is this legal advice?

No. It's a drafting tool, and the drafts are a starting point you should read against your own state's rules before you post anything.

Attorney response to negative reviews: what the rules actually say

The reason a lawyer's reply is different from a restaurant's is one rule and one opinion. ABA Model Rule 1.6(a) bars a lawyer from revealing information relating to the representation of a client, and Formal Opinion 496 held in January 2021 that a negative online review, on its own, is not a "controversy between the lawyer and the client" that would let the self-defense exception open. The practical effect is blunt: a client's negative review can contain public accusations and you still can't answer it with confidential facts.

That leaves a narrow, workable shape. Acknowledge in the abstract. State the public-response limit without asserting a firm-specific practice. Point at a channel that is already public. Stop. The opinion supplies two model sentences of its own: one invites private contact, and the other says professional obligations do not allow the reply the lawyer would like to make. Both are short.

The states don't all draw the line in the same place. Texas allows a "proportional and restrained response". Los Angeles County requires one that is "proportionate and restrained" and does not harm the client. Colorado goes further than the ABA committee thinks it should. We use the narrowest envelope in the opinions the ABA collected.

The counterweight is real, and it is worth stating plainly rather than pretending the ethics answer is free. BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey for 2026 found 89% of consumers expect business owners to respond to reviews. That is consumers generally, not people hiring lawyers. But the opinion's own advice runs the other way, toward considering not responding at all, and reconciling those two is the actual decision in front of you. A short, restrained reply is one option. Silence is the other legitimate answer, and this page will say so when the inputs point that way.

Sources and last checked

  • ABA Formal Opinion 496, "Responding to Online Criticism", January 13, 2021. The opinion the whole envelope is built from, read in full at the ABA's own text.
  • Google Business Profile reply rules and the Google Maps user-generated-content policy.
  • Yelp Content Guidelines, the third-party AI sentence quoted above.
  • FTC Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials, 16 CFR Part 465.
  • BrightLocal Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, published February 11, 2026, for the single consumer figure above.
  • State bar ethics resources, dataset version bar-ethics-2026-08-25. We verified 46 of the 51 entries by opening the page and reading its body.

Last checked: 2026-08-25. We read each of these at the source rather than through somebody's summary of it.

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