I’ve now run persona and user journey work for several law firms. The answer to “what do users do on the site?” comes back the same every time, in roughly the same order.
See what services the firm offers.
See what sectors the firm works in.
Read the biography of the lawyer they’re going to be working with.
Get a phone number or an email address.
That’s the list.
Reading articles, downloading thought leadership, listening to podcasts and watching videos all sit below those four. Often well below. In some firms they barely register at all.
This isn’t an argument that thought leadership is worthless. It’s an argument that the place thought leadership currently lives, on a dedicated insights section on the main website, is the wrong place. The right place is on the lawyer’s biography page, where the readers are, attached to the credentials that matter to the user when they land there.
Why the priority order matters
Because every decision in a website project gets easier once you’ve agreed it.
What goes on the home page? The four priorities. Above the fold, two clear paths. Services on one side, sectors on the other. Bios and contact one click away.
What does the navigation do? Drops the user to the four priority pages in as few clicks as possible. Most law firm navigations need three clicks to get to a sector landing page. Two should be the maximum. One is better.
What does the insights section look like? Smaller, sharper, attached to the people. Articles get tagged to their author and shown on the bio. The dedicated insights archive shrinks. The marketing team stops being asked to publish a new article every fortnight to fill the section.
What does the CMS need to do? Render those four page types beautifully on mobile. Everything else is secondary.
What does the agency need to demonstrate? That they understand which pages are doing the work. If they’re showing you their best art direction on a vanity insights landing page in the pitch, they haven’t read the brief.
What this looks like in practice
The firm I’m working with at the moment has about 17,000 indexed pages. Most of them are old articles, news items and event listings. After the new site goes live, that number will be a fraction of what it is today. The bulk of the content gets migrated to the lawyer bio pages or retired entirely.
Old articles by lawyers who’ve left the firm: retired. Old articles by current lawyers: migrated to the bio. Event listings older than 24 months: retired. News items that aren’t actually news: retired.
The result will be a site that’s easier to navigate, easier to crawl, faster to load and easier for the marketing team to maintain. The partners will get more visible credentials, not fewer, because their best articles will be next to their face and their phone number.
This kind of thinking only happens if you’ve done the persona and user journey work first. Without it, every page is somebody’s pet project and nothing can be cut.
The test for your own site
Open your home page on mobile. Time how long it takes to get to a sector landing page. Time how long it takes to find a named lawyer’s bio. Time how long it takes to find a phone number.
If any of those takes more than three taps, you’ve got the same problem most law firm sites have.
The fix is structural. The structural fix needs a brief. The brief needs the four priorities written down and agreed.
That’s the place to start.