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How to run a law firm website project without wasting money

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Most law firm website projects do not fail at the build. They fail months earlier, at the point someone signs off a brief for a site nobody properly understood, and picks an agency before the firm knows what it actually needs. By the time that shows up, the money is largely gone.

It does not have to go that way. Here is the order that keeps a large legal website project sane.

Understand what you have before you change anything

A firm's website grows over years, added to by dozens of hands, until it is far bigger and messier than anyone realises. Before you rebuild it, measure the reality. What does the analytics actually say, once you have checked the tracking is even telling the truth? How many pages are there really? Which ones do clients and referrers actually use, and which have not been touched since a partner left in 2019?

This is unglamorous and it is the most important part. On one large firm's site the true page count ran to five figures, and nobody in the building had the full picture until it was crawled properly. You cannot brief a rebuild of something you have never honestly looked at.

Brief it from evidence, not opinion

A brief built on partners' preferences is a brief built on sand, because every partner has a different preference. A brief built on what the data, the staff and the clients actually show is one everyone can get behind.

Work out what the site has to do, in plain terms, before anyone mentions technology. Who uses it, what they are trying to do, where it currently lets them down. Only once that is settled do you get to the interesting-but-secondary questions of design and platform. Get that order wrong and you buy a better-looking version of the same problem.

Choose the agency as a process, not a hunch

Lawyers, of all people, understand the value of a defensible process, so run the agency selection like one. Write the requirements down. Invite a few agencies, including your incumbent if you have one, to answer the same brief. Have them present to the people who will live with the result, not just the person signing the cheque. Then choose on fit and evidence, not on the cheapest quote or the slickest deck.

The cheapest bid that misses wastes far more than the slightly dearer one that lands. And a decision made this way stands up to scrutiny when a managing partner asks, six months in, why you chose who you chose.

Then keep it governed

None of it survives without the dull discipline of governance. A clear plan, regular reporting, someone whose job is to catch the small slips before they become big ones. Large projects do not drift because of one dramatic failure. They drift because a hundred little things went unnoticed.

The takeaway

If your firm is weighing up a new website, resist the pull to jump straight to agencies and designs. Slow down at the start. Understand the site, brief it from evidence, buy through a fair process, and govern the build. Do it in that order and even a big, expensive project stays calm and the spend stays justified.

I have run exactly this for a national law firm, under NDA, from a full audit through to selecting the agency and managing the build. If you are facing the same project, I am happy to talk it through.

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