Getting Started

Installation

February 15, 2026 docsadmin 4 min read

This guide walks you through installing the Legal WordPress Theme on a fresh WordPress site. The whole process takes about three minutes, after which you’ll have a working theme with the default editorial palette — bone canvas, oxblood ink, gold leaf accents.

If you’ve already installed WordPress themes before, the only thing worth flagging is that Legal is a parent theme, not a starter kit. You install it as a regular theme; you don’t unpack it into your existing theme folder.

Before you begin

Make sure you have:

  • A WordPress site running version 5.8 or higher (Legal uses block-editor APIs that aren’t reliable below 5.8)
  • PHP 7.4 or higher on your server (most managed hosts default to 8.x in 2026)
  • Administrator access to your WordPress dashboard
  • The legal.zip file you downloaded from fasterthemes.com — keep it as a zip, do not unzip it

You don’t need to install any other themes or plugins first. Legal is self-contained.

This is the path most people take. It works for fresh installs and for sites you’re switching over.

  1. Log into your WordPress dashboard.
  2. Go to Appearance → Themes.
  3. Click the Add New Theme button at the top of the page, then click Upload Theme.
  4. Click Choose File, select your legal.zip, and click Install Now.
  5. WordPress will unpack the theme. After it finishes, click Activate.

The site immediately switches to Legal. If you visit your home page now, you’ll see the theme’s default editorial layout with placeholder content — your existing pages, posts, and menus are still there; only the visual theme has changed.

Method 2 — Upload via FTP / SFTP

Use this if your host blocks zip uploads (some shared hosts do for security reasons), or if you maintain themes through version control.

  1. On your local machine, unzip legal.zip. You should see a folder called legal/ containing files like style.css, functions.php, template-firm.php, and so on.
  2. Connect to your server via SFTP using credentials from your host.
  3. Navigate to wp-content/themes/.
  4. Upload the entire legal/ folder. Do not upload the contents of the folder — upload the folder itself, so the final path becomes wp-content/themes/legal/style.css.
  5. Back in WordPress, go to Appearance → Themes. You’ll see Legal in the list. Click Activate.

What you should see after activation

The theme adds a few things to your dashboard immediately:

  • A new menu item under Appearance → Legal Pro — this is where you’ll go for the welcome screen and Pro upgrade information. (The menu name is “Legal Pro” even before you install the Pro plugin; it’s a convention from FasterThemes’ theme family.)
  • A handful of new options inside the Customizer: Hero, Practice tiles, Counsel cards, Ledger, Testimony, and Engage sections.
  • Three new menu locations available under Appearance → Menus: Primary, Mobile bottom-bar, and Footer.
  • Four footer widget areas (the third one is intended for a “Counsel” or contact-info widget; the fourth is reserved for a future release).

If you’re seeing a default WordPress fallback theme instead of Legal, the upload didn’t complete. Check the file size of your legal.zip against what you downloaded — incomplete zips are the most common cause of failed activations.

Verify the theme version

After activation, you can confirm the version by going to Appearance → Themes and clicking on Legal’s thumbnail. The “Theme Details” sidebar shows the version number, which should match what’s on the download page. As of this writing, the current version is 3.0.0.

If you’re seeing version 2.x, you have an outdated package. Re-download from fasterthemes.com and use Method 1 to upload the newer file — WordPress will replace the older copy automatically.

What’s next

Now that the theme is installed, the next step is to populate it with your firm’s content. Read Getting Started for the four-step setup that takes a blank Legal install to a working firm home page in about ten minutes.

If you’ve also purchased the Pro plugin and want the one-click Lex & Co. demo to seed your site with sample content, see One-Click Demo Importer.

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