Some of it is advertising but it surely is not automatically all advertising, in my view. A public service announcement, for example, does not advertise services. Links to other sites are not advertising of a lawyer's services in any traditional sense of the word. My point is that applying a single label to an entire web site may tend to chill lawyers' creativity unnecessarily. Instead, the content should be screened, on a granular level, for whether it falls within the regulated scope of lawyer advertising.
Sites are just aggregations of all sorts of content, like public libraries are.
A legal web site is a sponsored public library of all sorts of information and communications, some of which clearly are advertising. As for litigation, the only way it could be inappropriate is if the firm does not conduct litigation. These are basic descriptive words that accurately focus on the nature of the site. The occasional metatag case has been an unfair competition case. My view is that lawyers are badly needed in cyberspace, and if the profession, relatively speaking, sits on the sidelines or does not aggressively take advantage of the medium and the technology, we are going to be diminished in myriad ways.