I took 25 Irish law firm websites, picked at random across Dublin, Cork, Galway, Limerick and Waterford, and checked one thing on each: what loads the moment you arrive, before you touch the cookie banner. No names, no accusations — just what a browser records on a clean first visit. Here is the picture.
Eleven of the 25 were tracking visitors before anyone clicked accept. Five of those were the serious end — advertising cookies firing, or no consent banner at all. Another eleven were clean: nothing firing early, a current privacy notice. The last three had minor slips. So the split is roughly half in good order, a quarter with a real consent problem, and the rest somewhere between.
The patterns repeat. The most common is the plainest: a cookie banner sits on the page promising to hold analytics and advertising until you agree, while the tags behind it fire on arrival regardless. The banner was never wired to the tags. One site went further — its own consent record read "advertisement: no" while the Google advertising cookie was already set. One firm was still running a version of Google Analytics retired back in 2014.
That is the important part: this is drift, not malice. A banner gets added by one supplier, a tracking pixel by another, a privacy policy gets copied across from an older site — and nobody ever reads the whole thing cold, the way a stranger does. Each piece is reasonable on its own. The join is where it goes wrong.
It matters more for a solicitor than for most. A law firm's website meets people at their rawest — after a crash, a bereavement, buying a first home — and often at the exact moment they are about to hand over personal details to make contact. "Agree first, track second" is the one promise the banner makes, and a legal practice is the one place it has to hold. Some of what I saw is the kind of thing a regulator would notice.
The encouraging half of the result is that eleven firms had it right. A clean site is not hard or expensive: the tracking simply waits for consent, and the privacy page says what is actually true. It is not a question of budget. It is a question of whether anyone has looked.
Wonder what your own site loads before a visitor agrees to anything?
That is exactly what the free brief answers. I take an independent look and tell you straight whether there is anything worth investigating — and sometimes the honest answer is that you are grand, so do not spend money on it.
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