Over our 24-year history, we’ve had the opportunity to speak with hundreds of legal marketing leaders about law firm web design and development challenges.
You see, law firms aren’t like other businesses.
They offer various services, and their revenue doesn't come from simple purchases or subscriptions.
This makes it hard to create a website that meets all users' needs and to report on the new design's success.
In this article, we guide you through the top five law firm web design & development challenges and how to overcome them.
1. Balancing SEO vs User Experience.
Google loves in-depth, informative content.
For the most part, your website visitors do too.
However, presenting it as lengthy text blocks can be overwhelming for your prospective clients.
It neither looks great, nor is it particularly engaging for the reader.
There are several web design methods for law firms to provide important information in a more digestible way.
One of those is implementing a jump-to menu.
There’s a certain level of detail required to explain complex legal processes.
So, a certain amount of copy is often unavoidable.
But this doesn’t mean you have to make your users endlessly scroll through paragraph after paragraph.
A jump-to menu allows users to quickly navigate to the information they need.
It could feature relevant services, case studies, testimonials or other useful content.
You could also utilise a 50/50 fixed image column to balance long blocks of text and visuals.
A fixed image on one side prevents a large white space, maintaining design balance.
The other side of the page is occupied by your copy which scrolls beside your fixed image.
This allows for substantial text without the scrolling feeling excessive.
The copy and image always remain in view alongside one another, which helps to provide context and reinforce the messaging of the text.
Real-world example.
Hudgell Solicitors wanted to optimise their pages with detailed copy. We used a fixed 50/50 image column on their service pages to enable them to populate their pages with lots of copy without compromising user experiences.
2. Taxonomy.
Taxonomy also tops the law firm web design challenges list.
First things first, we need to understand what it is.
Website taxonomy is the structuring of content into categories and subcategories.
This gives your website a logical structure which is easy for your users to navigate.
This can be challenging for law firms due to the wide range of services and sub-services they offer.
With that in mind, we recommend you begin by separating your ‘personal’ and ‘business’ services.
These are two very different areas of practice with unique audiences, presenting a suitable place to begin structuring your website content.
From here, you can work in a hierarchical format until you’ve categorised even your most niche sub-services.
Typically, your slug structure should end up looking like this:
[practice area] [business/personal] / [service] / [subservice]
And this is how it might look in practice:
www.yourlawfirmwebsite.com/employment-law-personal/breach-of-contract/breach-of-confidentiality
Of course, this isn’t the only possible approach to website taxonomy.
If you choose to structure your site differently, just ensure it’s consistent and intuitive.
We have a useful technique you can use to check this.
Imagine you added a breadcrumb menu, showing all the pages a user visited to reach the page they’re currently on.
Would it display a pathway which is hierarchical and logical?
Or would it show the user has jumped from page to page with no clear method or linear approach?
If the answer is the latter, the user has probably struggled to find the information they were looking for.
In this case, you should seriously reconsider your website taxonomy.
3. Categorising services and presenting in a clean menu structure.
Once you’re satisfied with the structure and categories you want to use on your site, the next step is displaying them.
Again, most law firm web design projects involve creating lots of pages for the wealth of services you offer.
This can make it tricky to design a menu which looks good and offers simple navigation to every page.
But there is a solution we strongly recommend.
That is to implement a mega menu structure.
So, what exactly is a mega menu?
A mega menu is a large dropdown menu displaying multiple categories and options in a structured, easy-to-navigate panel.
When you hover over or click on a main item, several other options related to the main item appear.
Unlike a standard menu which displays a handful of links in a single list, a mega menu offers greater expansion options.
It can incorporate several columns and elements, including images and icons, to offer a comprehensive overview of all your content.
Branching from the main item to more specific content helps users easily navigate to the exact information they need.
Now you know why you need a mega menu, let’s look at an example for Magrath Sheldrick, a leading international employment and immigration law specialist.
First, services are separated depending on their target audience:
- Business
- Personal
If a user interacts with the Business option, the menu expands to present a column of relevant services.
These services are more specific, directly relating to their unique circumstances:
- Business Immigration Law
- Employer Sponsorship and Compliance
- Magrath Sheldrick Singapore
- Global Mobility
- US Immigration
From here, users have the opportunity to hone in further on the particular sub-service they require.
Interacting with the Business Immigration Law sub-service presents an additional column of sub-services:
- Business Visitors
- UK Immigration Rules
- Investors
- Global Talent
- Skilled Workers
- UK Sponsor Licence Application
- Temporary Worker Sponsor Licence
- Global Business Mobility
From this single mega menu, users can quickly and easily access the page and information most relevant to their circumstances.
Of course, this example likely won’t meet your firm’s specific requirements.
You need to design a mega menu based entirely upon your unique services.
It should be structured around the services your users frequently look for, making it as simple as possible for them to find the information and access the support they need.
4. Tagging news and advice articles.
Your law firm’s web design needs to consist of more than just service pages.
It needs to provide plenty of supporting content, including thought leadership, legal guides, case studies, and more.
Producing regular, high-quality content requires a lot of resources, but it’s worth the effort in the long run.
A well-planned content strategy further helps to address the needs and concerns of prospective clients, enhancing their experience.
It is also a key component of any law firm's SEO strategy.
It reinforces your firm’s expertise and experience, helping to build trust amongst your target audience and gain an edge over your competitors.
In fact, showcasing your firm’s expertise through high-quality, authentic content has become increasingly vital since Google’s March 2024 core update.
In short, its main purpose is to clamp down on spammy AI-generated content.
This is highlighted further in Google’s August 2024 update, which emphasises the importance of experience and expertise as key trust signals for search engines.
If you want to improve your rankings and user engagement, producing valuable, relevant thought leadership content is an absolute must.
That being said, having a range of content presents a common law firm web design challenge:
How do you design and structure your site so users can easily find the thought leadership and case studies they’re looking for?
This is done through tagging.
When you create a blog or news article you should add tags based on the characteristics of that piece of content.
These tags then link to other relevant pages, giving the user easy access to additional information they might find useful.
Some of the tags we recommend law firms use include:
- Service tags
- Sub-service tags
- Format tags (eg. Advice, News, Video, Podcast)
- Lawyer tag
Service and sub-service tags make it easy for users to find out answers to their questions, guiding them towards becoming an intake.
Format tags help users discover and consume more content in their preferred format.
Finally, lawyer tags link to pages which provide information about who has produced the content, including their practice areas, expertise, and experience.
This indicates to both users and search engines the content is authentic and has been created by someone knowledgeable on the subject.
Lawyer bios linked to thought leadership articles also send trust signals to Google that the content is written by an expert (and not AI dross).
5. KPIs & Reporting.
Having spent time, effort, and resources designing your law firm’s website, you’ll need a way of measuring its success.
Setting out your law firm KPIs gives you a clear, measurable way of tracking progress towards your main goals and objectives.
While this strictly isn’t a law firm web design challenge, it's certainly something you should be considering during the web design process.
Having clear KPIs in place will enable law firm marketing leaders to demonstrate success metrics to managing partners post-launch.
However, determining KPIs and presenting them visually isn’t simple.
We highly recommend integrating Google Analytics 4 (GA4) with your website and setting up key events to enhance monitoring and analysis.
Key events are conversions or actions taken by your users that you deem to be important for generating clients and revenue.
A few examples of key events law firms should focus on include form submissions, phone calls, newsletter sign-ups, and more.
The more of these key events you’re generating, the more effective your web design and marketing are.
While GA4 is great for people who are familiar with it like legal marketing leaders, it’s not the best for displaying KPIs to partners and stakeholders.
That’s why we also recommend integrating Google Looker Studio.
Integrating Google Looker Studio with GA4 allows you to create highly visual custom dashboards to showcase your key website metrics.
These include:
- YoY Summary and Previous Period Summary: Reporting on both 'all users' and 'organic users.'
- Active Users
- New Users
- Total Conversions
- Conversion Event Breakdown
- User Conversion Rate
- Percentage of Engaged Users
- Average Engagement Time
- Service Rankings (e.g., Personal Injury)
- Subservice Rankings (e.g., Accidents at Work)
- Rankings Distribution
- Benchmark Rankings vs. Current Rankings
- Sources and Engagement
- Best and Worst
- Ranking keywords
- Climbing/Falling keywords
- Performing Pages (traffic, conversions, engagement time)
- Intake-to-instructed conversion rate
- Monthly intakes vs target
- Lead source and attribution
- Number of prospects in each matter pipeline stage
- Conversion rates between matter pipeline stages
- Matter stage percentage of total
- Intakes by week, month, all-time
- Matters instructed by week, month, all-time
- Closed lost reasons
- Total matters in pipeline by stage and by fee earner
- Stale matters (no activity in X days)
- Average time in matter stages
- ROI by channel
- ROI by service
With visual evidence of the success created by your web design and marketing efforts, you can make a much stronger case for further optimisations which require additional budget.
Custom dashboards reinforce company culture changes, encouraging fee earners to produce content despite heavy case/matter loads.
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Need a law firm web design?
Contra has designed high-performing, sophisticated websites for some of the UK’s leading law firms. We know what it takes to create a design optimised for user experience and SEO, helping to build trust, increase engagement and drive intakes.
