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Recently named Law Firm of the Year 2010 by the ‘The Lawyer’ magazine, Berwin Leighton Paisner LLP (BLP) is a premier, full-service law firm headquartered in the City of London.

BLP is an ambitious law firm that has been one of the fastest growing in the UK over recent years. Its international reach extends to over 65 jurisdictions through offices in Abu Dhabi, Brussels, Moscow, Paris and Singapore, and managed relationships with more than 100 other expert law firms worldwide.

BLP is committed to the personal service it delivers to clients and so a new website had to cater directly to their needs. BLP chose Design UK as its website agency because of our proven successes in increasing conversion rates on both consumer and business-facing sites, through innovative and high quality design, mixed with a high level of scientific understanding of the customer journey.  Design UK created a full website solution for BLP in July 2009 and more recently refreshed the site’s design to reflect their new branding.

The Problem – The original site just wasn’t selling the firm
BLP’s previous website was developed in the early ‘Noughties’. The original navigation struggled to cope with BLP’s depth of expertise, which spans over 60 legal disciplines, more than 20 industry sectors and multiple continents, therefore users were finding it hard to navigate to the information they needed.

Ultimately, the site didn’t provide a compelling platform to promote or showcase the strengths of the firm, such as the Law Firm of the Year 2010 award

The Challenges – Demonstrate BLP’s expertise and international capabilities
In creating a site that was going to work hard for visitors and the business, BLP had two major objectives: to increase the conversion rate by guiding visitors straight to the right lawyer for them; and to better reflect the firm’s progressive brand.

In particular BLP wanted existing clients visiting its site to be exposed to the other areas of law practised by the firm, as well as its international expertise. Also key was creating a serious cutting edge site that achieved the desired balance between being personal and professional, serious and warm.

The Solution – A modern approach for a traditional business
Working closely with a large, cross-functional team from BLP, our first step was to really understand what prospective clients wanted. This knowledge combined with our consumer experience enabled us to map out different types of ‘user journey’ through the site, which we then converted into a site and navigation structure with a logical and visitor-friendly menu system.  Key aspects of the solution included:

• An updated homepage to showcase the latest big legal and firm developments which BLP can change at the drop of a hat to keep the site fresh and ‘of the moment’.
• A number of different routes to the content - via search, home page highlight features, a user-friendly ‘how can we help you?’ menu, tabbed content and ‘mega-menus’.
• An interactive map on the website to demonstrate BLP’s international capability.
• Usage of lawyer pictures across the site to provide a clear and logical pathway through over 1500 pages of information, each with a clear ‘call to action’ inviting contact with an individual at BLP. 
• A Lawyer Directory function that is always available, so visitors can always short-cut straight to a team or a specific lawyer.
• Development on LavaSuite, Design UK’s online marketing platform to give the BLP team total control over content, and the ability to manage and assess the success of different parts of the site.

The end result
The BLP website demonstrates that methods used in the consumer space to create smart, client-friendly user interfaces and complex websites can be translated to the business realm with great success.

Since launch BLP has seen site statistics that prove they’re on the right track.  According to Brian Macreadie, Marketing Development Manager at BLP:  “The average visitor is staying on site approximately 50% longer and one-page visits have reduced by a third compared to our original site, which we believe is down to improved navigation and more interesting presentation. We’ve also seen people coming to look at one legal discipline, and then take time to check-out others, which can’t harm our chances of cross-selling our services.”

We continue to work closely with BLP to fine-tune and develop its web presence to offer clients and prospective customers an even more engaging and informative user experience.

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