A web agency can build a site, secure it, optimize it for SEO and organize your pages. However, if it’s not a law firm (or a licensed professional), it can’t promise that your legal notices are “legally perfect” or “100% compliant”. The reason is simple: in France, the activity of providing
In concrete terms, as soon as an agency moves from the role of “I lay out the information you provide” to “I tell you what to write to be compliant, and I guarantee it’s compliant”, it moves into a risky area: that of legal advice. It’s not a question of good will, but of professional boundaries.
Added to this is a very operational point: compliance depends on your actual situation, and it changes fast. The French Ministry of the Economy reminds us that legal notices are used to identify a company, and that the law (LCEN) specifies the information that must appear. Depending on whether you are a natural person (micro-enterprise/sole proprietorship) or a legal entity (company), and on your activity (merchant site, regulated activity, subscription…), the mandatory content varies. source : Ministry of the Economy
Last but not least, this is not just a theoretical issue: the same article in the French Ministry of the Economy and Finance sets out the penalties for failure to include legal information (penalties and fines).
Au sommaire de cet article :
What a web agency can do, in concrete terms, without taking the place of a lawyer
A serious agency can (and should) recommend what should exist on the site, in the sense of a “checklist of pages and elements”, based on official sources. For example, the French Ministry of the Economy lists the information typically expected: identity and contact details, hosting information (name/company name/address/telephone number of the host), and additional information depending on the activity (RCS/RNE, intracommunity VAT if applicable, publication director for an information site, etc.).
In the same way, the agency can alert you to “risk” bricks that aren’t just a static page. Here are some concrete examples:
- If you collect data (contact form, newsletter, customer area), the Ministry reminds you of your duty of transparency and a list of information to be made available (purpose, legal basis, retention period, rights, DPO contact or contact point, etc.).
- If you use cookies, the CNIL reminds you that some trackers require information + prior consent, in accordance with the ePrivacy directive and the French framework, and specifies that consent must be free/specific/enlightened and easy to withdraw. source : CNIL
- If you sell online to private customers, the General Terms and Conditions of Sale are becoming a central issue. Service-Public Entreprendre reminds you of this obligation, and mentions a penalty for non-compliance for private customers. Source : Service Public Entreprendre
The agency can therefore propose a compliance architecture: pages to be created, locations, footer links, cookie path, information screens, and collect information from you. But it must remain within the logic of “implementation + recommendations from official sources”, not “legal validation”.
Form and content: what the agency can recommend
On the substance, an agency may ask you for the necessary information (company name, head office, contact, registration, publication director if relevant, host, etc.) and insert it in a “Legal Notices” page, because these elements are explicitly expected. It may also point out that “legal notices” and “RGPD information” are not exactly the same thing, as the CNIL reminds us.
In terms of form, an agency can guarantee non-legal but measurable criteria: accessibility from all pages (footer), legibility, versioning, date of update, consistency of links (privacy policy, cookies, GTC), and integration of a cookie interface in line with the “inform and choose” principle. On this last point, the CNIL insists that the user must be able to accept/refuse with a comparable degree of simplicity.
A sound method: agency + customer + lawyer, each in his own place
The most robust (and modern) model is simple: the agency produces a “compliance-ready” site (the right pages, the right locations, the right feeds), you provide the exact information about your company and your treatments, then a lawyer (or authorized professional) performs the validation and, if necessary, adjusts sensitive wording.
It’s also a way of preparing for 2026 and beyond: your obligations are no longer a fixed document, but a living system. New functionalities, new marketing tools, evolving cookies, new acquisition channels: all this changes compliance. In practice, your competitive advantage will be to have a site that can evolve quickly, without “breaking” transparency and user confidence.