Every time I run a CMS evaluation for a law firm, the same thing happens. The IT team has a preference. The agency has a preference. The marketing team has a preference. The partners don’t have a preference because they don’t know what a CMS is, but they’ve been told the new one will be “more flexible.”
The conversation that follows tends to focus on the wrong thing.
A good agency can build a great website on WordPress, Statamic, Umbraco, Drupal, Sitecore, Optimizely or Kentico. A bad agency can deliver a mediocre site on any of them. The CMS isn’t the variable. The agency is.
What CMS evaluations usually miss
Most evaluations I see are scored on the wrong axes. Features. Scalability. Marketplace ecosystem. Multilingual support. Headless capabilities.
Those things matter, but they’re table stakes. Every CMS on the shortlist for a mid size law firm site can render the four page types that actually carry the traffic. Every one can do SEO friendly URLs, schema markup, breadcrumbs and XML sitemaps. Every one can integrate with MailChimp, MS Dynamics or a marketing automation platform of your choice. Every one can be made to perform well on Core Web Vitals if the agency knows what they’re doing.
The differences that matter aren’t between the platforms. They’re between the implementations.
The things you actually need to evaluate
How well does the agency you’re considering know the CMS they’re recommending. There’s a difference between “we’ve delivered three sites on this platform” and “we’ve delivered fifty.” The fifty number matters more than the marketing copy on the CMS vendor’s website.
How dependent is the implementation on the agency. Some agencies lock the CMS behind custom templates and bespoke integrations that nobody else can pick up. The IP clause in your RFP needs to handle this. Read it carefully.
What does maintenance look like when the relationship with the agency ends. It does end, eventually. Pick a CMS where the talent pool is broad enough to find a replacement easily. WordPress and Drupal have the largest pools. The proprietary platforms can be excellent, but the talent pool is narrower and the cost of switching is higher.
What does the editing experience look like for a marketing executive at 4pm on a Thursday with a partner asking for a tweak. The CMS interface matters less than people think on the day of launch, and more than people think six months later. Get a real demo with real content. Watch the marketing team use it, not the agency.
Security. Most CMS choices fall into a “good enough” band for a law firm website that isn’t capturing sensitive data. The exception is if the site sits behind a client portal, in which case the security posture matters considerably more.
Cost. Licence fees vary. Hosting requirements vary. Long term cost of ownership is usually a function of how well the site was built, not what it was built on.
The framework I use
When I’m scoping a CMS for a law firm, I shortlist three or four platforms that fit the brief, score them against a small set of criteria, and present the recommendation as a default rather than a mandate.
The mandate goes in the RFP. The agencies are asked to recommend a CMS and defend the choice. The agencies who agree with the default get a quick conversation. The agencies who push back constructively get a longer one. Both are useful signals.
The CMS gets chosen at the end of agency selection, not at the start.
The headline
If you spend three months evaluating a CMS without evaluating the agency that’ll build on it, you’ve solved the easy half of the problem. Pick the agency you trust. Let them defend the platform. Build the contract so you can leave both.