We looked at 815 attorney headshots from 218 personal injury firms to find out what PI lawyers wear, how they pose, and what’s behind them.
Optimize My Firm | 815 headshots (612 men, 203 women) | 218 firms in 93 U.S. cities | October 2026
Illustration, not a real attorney. Built from the most common tags in the study.
| What we measured | Result |
|---|---|
| Wearing a suit jacket or blazer | 93% (758 of 815) |
| Jacket is navy, black, or charcoal | 77% of jackets |
| Wearing a tie, among collared shirts | 90% (549 of 608) |
| White collared shirt | 79% of collared shirts |
| Full suit and tie | 66% of all photos, 88% of men |
| Smiling with teeth | 62% |
| Closed-mouth smile | 33% |
| Serious | 5% |
| Plain backdrop (gray, white, dark, or colored) | 52% |
| Office or interior | 22% |
| Cutout or green screen | 11% |
| Outdoors or city skyline | 10% |
| Bookshelf of law books | 4% |
| Arms crossed | 6% |
| Glasses | 14% |
| Black and white | 2% |
93% of PI lawyers wore a jacket, and 77% of those jackets were navy, black, or charcoal. Navy and black were tied at 33% each. Among men, navy led clearly (38% vs. 27% black). Among women, black led by a wide margin (53% vs. 18% navy).
Only 2% of jackets were brown, tan, or olive, and 1% were white or cream. A light or warm-colored jacket is one of the easiest ways to stand out.
90% of lawyers in a collared shirt wore a tie. Only 10% of men went without a tie, and just 4% of men skipped the jacket.
Blue was the most common tie (24%), followed by red (20%) and striped (16%). Together, blue and red make up almost half of all ties. Bow ties appeared just 6 times, at 6 different firms.
The shirt underneath is almost always white (79% of collared shirts). Another 18% were light blue. Only 3% were another color, such as lavender, pink, or a pattern.
62% smiled with teeth and another 33% gave a closed-mouth smile. Only 5% looked serious. Women smiled with teeth a little more often than men (67% vs. 61%). Serious faces were almost entirely men: 33 of the 37 serious photos.
Serious photos also clustered by firm. One firm accounted for 6 of the 37 serious headshots. That suggests the photographer or the firm’s brand, not the lawyer, sets the expression.
The bookshelf of law books, once the default lawyer backdrop, appeared in only 4% of photos. Courtrooms didn’t show up at all, and flags or state seals came from just 2 firms. The most common setting was an office or interior (22%), followed by plain gray (18%), plain white (15%), and plain dark or black (13%).
11% of headshots were cut out and placed on a black, transparent, or green-screen background. That came from 29 of 218 firms (13%). Several of these showed jagged, pixelated edges or glitchy streaks where the cutout was cleaned up poorly. On a firm’s own bio page, that looks cheap next to a clean studio shot.
Of the 162 firms with two or more headshots, 60 (37%) used different backgrounds for different lawyers. That often means photos were taken at different times by different photographers. Firms with matching photos look more established on the team page.
We split firms into thirds by branded search volume, the 12-month median of Google searches for the firm’s name.
| Firm group | Plain studio | Office | Outdoors | Tie (collared shirts) | Smile with teeth |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top third by branded search | 57% | 25% | 8% | 86% | 59% |
| Middle third | 47% | 31% | 8% | 91% | 68% |
| Bottom third | 44% | 26% | 18% | 94% | 60% |
The most-searched firms used plain studio backdrops more often and outdoor shots less often. They were also a bit more likely to skip the tie. Multistate firms showed the same pattern: fewer teeth smiles (57% vs. 64%) and fewer ties (85% vs. 92%).
Photo style does not track Google rating. Firms rated 4.9 or higher wore ties and smiled at about the same rates as lower-rated firms. Reviews come from client service, not the headshot.
| Region | Photos | Jacket | Tie (collared shirts) | Smile with teeth | Serious |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| South | 380 | 95% | 95% | 59% | 6% |
| Midwest | 142 | 94% | 86% | 75% | 1% |
| West | 234 | 91% | 86% | 59% | 3% |
| Northeast | 59 | 85% | 88% | 63% | 12% |
Southern lawyers were the most likely to wear a tie. Midwestern lawyers smiled the most. Northeastern lawyers were the most serious, though that region had the smallest sample. Western firms used dark backdrops (20%) more than any other region.
A handful of firms broke the pattern:
You don’t have to wear a cowboy hat. But in a sea of navy suits on gray paper, any original detail is memorable.
When someone searches “car accident lawyer near me,” they see the same five firms on the map. Then they click through to bio pages that all look alike. A headshot is one of the few places a firm can show who its lawyers really are.
This is the same idea behind good PI content. Original photos and real perspective beat the generic stock look most firms settle for.
We started with the Google Maps top 5 for personal injury lawyers in each of the 100 cities in our earlier AI study. After removing duplicates, that gave 368 firms. 218 firms had usable attorney photos, covering 93 cities in 35 states.
We pulled headshots from each firm’s own attorney bio pages. If a firm had no bio pages, we used its team page. We kept images with exactly one face, up to 6 attorneys per firm, and read the bio text to remove paralegals, case managers, and other staff.
One reviewer tagged every photo by hand using visible features: man or woman, jacket and color, top, shirt color, tie and color, expression, pose, background, glasses, and black and white. We did not tag race or age. 11 images were removed, including repeat photos of the same person, ad graphics, video stills, group shots, a stock image, and an old sports photo. That left 815 headshots.
Google rating, review count, and Maps rank come from our 100-city dataset. Branded search volume is the 12-month median from our Most Googled study.
Optimize My Firm helps personal injury firms grow with strong SEO, real backlinks, and original content, including unique photos and real perspective that most agencies skip.