Legal · Multi-stakeholder · 2012–2014
Weitz & Luxenberg
Helping run a national plaintiffs' law firm website redesign alongside attorneys, compliance and a roster of outside vendors.
Visit weitzlux.comI worked in-house at the firm from July 2012 to August 2014, when the site ran on the TERMINALFOUR (T4) content management system. The site has been redesigned since then, so the live site and the screenshots on this page show the firm today, not the version I helped build.
The challenge
A complete redesign of a prominent national law firm's website, built on the TERMINALFOUR (T4) CMS. Partners, attorneys and compliance were on the inside, and a group of outside vendors handled design, development and the platform. The site had to be modern and authoritative, follow strict attorney advertising rules, and stay easy to use for people arriving in some of the worst moments of their lives. All of this happened while the firm's day-to-day web work kept going.
My role
What I actually did
- Strategic liaison. A main point of contact between the firm's internal teams and the outside vendors working on design, development and the CMS.
- Requirements translation. Ran stakeholder interviews to pin down business goals, user needs and compliance constraints, then turned them into creative briefs and technical specs the vendors could actually build from.
- Cross-functional QA. Held the feedback loop between attorneys, compliance and vendors so every deliverable cleared the bar for accuracy, professionalism and risk.
- Unified delivery. Pulled the vendors' separate workstreams into one coherent site, focused on performance, accessibility and user trust.
- Case landing pages. Alongside the redesign, built landing pages for individual cases the firm was handling, such as defective medical devices and vehicle defects. Each page explained the issue in plain language and gave people who might be affected a clear way to contact the firm, with the wording cleared by the attorneys and compliance before it went live.
Outcome
Delivered on time and in scope, with the case landing page work running in parallel the whole way through. The project is the clearest demonstration of the non-technical half of this work: managing complex multi-stakeholder digital projects, operating inside a regulated environment, and turning a pile of conflicting inputs into one thing that works.
Questions
About this project
How do you run a website redesign for a large law firm?
Slowly, and with the stakeholders in the room. A national plaintiffs' firm redesign means attorneys, a compliance team and several outside vendors all holding a veto. The technical work is the easy half. The real job is sequencing decisions so that no one is surprised, compliance sees language before it ships, and the site launches without a single practice area losing its rankings.