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In order: understand the site you have, brief the rebuild from evidence, choose the agency through a fair process, then govern the build. Most law firm website projects fail months before the build, when a brief is signed off for a site nobody properly understood and an agency is picked before the firm knows what it needs. I have run this sequence for a national law firm under NDA, from a full audit through agency selection to managing the build.
What the site really is, measured rather than assumed. A firm's website grows over years, added to by dozens of hands, until it is bigger and messier than anyone realises. Check the analytics is telling the truth, then find out how many pages there really are, which ones clients and referrers use, and which have not been touched since a partner left in 2019.
This is the unglamorous part and the most important. On one large firm's site the true page count ran to five figures, and nobody in the building had the full picture until the site was crawled properly. You cannot brief a rebuild of something nobody has honestly looked at.
Because every partner has a different preference, and a brief built on preferences cannot hold. A brief built on what the data, the staff and the clients show is one the firm can get behind. Work out what the site has to do, who uses it, what they are trying to do and where it lets them down, in plain terms, before anyone mentions technology. Design and platform come after that.
As a process it could defend. Write the requirements down. Invite a few agencies, including the incumbent if there is one, to answer the same brief. Have them present to the people who will live with the result as well as the person signing the cheque, and choose on fit and evidence rather than the cheapest quote or the best-looking deck. A cheap bid that misses wastes far more than a slightly dearer one that lands, and a decision made this way stands up when a managing partner asks, six months in, why you chose who you chose.
Governance: a clear plan, regular reporting, and someone whose job is to catch small slips before they become large ones. Large projects rarely drift because of one dramatic failure. They drift because a hundred small things went unnoticed.
Related evidence: Managing a major website project for a national law firm. Earlier in this journey: Why your contract should have the RFP response stapled to it.
Because they grow over years through dozens of hands until they are far bigger than anyone realises, and every partner has a different preference. A brief built on what the data, staff and clients show is one the whole firm can get behind.
Yes, alongside a few others, all answering the same brief and presenting to the people who will live with the result.
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