A website is more than a page, picture and words. Visitors can assess the size of your law firm simply by looking at the design of your website and the way you organize content on it.

Last year, we wrote a blog titled, “What You Can Learn from Large Law Firms”. We looked at some of the largest law firms in the U.S. and discovered that most of these firms hosted libraries of content on their websites.

When our blog article was published in April of 2011, DLA Piper was the largest firm in the country by number of attorneys. Their website had more than 37,000 pages indexed in Google. Other firms had a few thousand pages of content, but overall, most large law firms filled their websites with massive amounts of content.

This year, DLA Piper was dethroned by another Chicago giant, Baker & McKenzie. It is here that we start looking at how large law firms design their websites.

Traditionally, large firms have treated their websites like corporate brochures. A lot of text, generic skyscraper imagery and some photos of well-dressed partners were all they needed to show off the size of their empires. But large firms are now putting a strong focus on making their websites functional. With global name recognition, onsite conversion is more important than key phrases and search engine rankings. Everybody knows their name, but why should they consider calling the firm? CONTINUE READING