A law firm's practice-area page loads in under a second and books more consults

Representative examplesEvery case study in this library is an illustrative composite of the kind of engagement we deliver — written to show our method and standards, not to name clients.

Where they started

Family-law clients arrive frightened, usually at night, usually on a phone — and this four-attorney practice has served one metro area long enough to know it. Consultations are genuinely scarce; the partners take a fixed number each week, and the intake coordinator screens every request by hand. The firm's practice-area pages sat inside a legacy site a vendor has maintained since it was built, describing the firm well and taking their time about it. The intake form beneath those pages asked for a life story before it asked for a name.

What it was costing

The firm's practice-area pages sat inside a slow legacy site; the intake form asked for a life story before any trust was built, and analytics showed most visitors leaving before the form's second section.

What they could see

• Analytics showed most visitors abandoning the intake form before its second section.
• The form requested incomes, dates, and opposing-party details before any trust had been built.
• Pages took visible seconds to load on the phones clients actually used late at night.
• The coordinator received full forms from people who then never answered the phone — heavy asks scare off the ambivalent.
• The vendor's edit queue meant even a typo fix on the page took a week.

The constraints we worked inside

• Bar advertising rules constrained claims and required specific disclaimers — the copy envelope was fixed.
• The firm's brand and hosting stayed as-is; only the intake experience could change.
• Consultations were capacity-limited — more volume without qualification would hurt, not help.

What had been tried before

The firm had paid the legacy vendor to 'optimize' the site two years earlier.

The work produced lighter images inside the same heavy framework, and the form — the actual exit point — was declared a content problem and left alone.

A marketing consultant recommended adding more practice-area pages targeting more keywords.

More doors into the same room: every new page fed the same slow, demanding form, and more volume without qualification threatened the scarce consultation slots.

The coordinator had drafted a shorter paper intake for use on phone calls.

It lived on paper and in her habits; the web form never changed, so the two intake paths quietly disagreed about what mattered and in what order.

What we proposed

Earn the form progressively: the intake splits into a three-question first step anyone can answer, with the full history requested only after the visitor has already responded once — commitment follows contact. The practice page itself is hand-coded against the firm's identity at a fraction of the weight, with the bar-required disclaimers kept verbatim and untouchable. Form-step events are instrumented so future changes argue from where anxious visitors actually leave, not from anyone's guess about which question scares people off.

Just as important is what we ruled out, and why:

• Migrating the whole site off the legacy platform — The constraint was the intake experience, not the platform; a migration invited a year of vendor meetings and put live pages the firm depends on at risk for no intake gain.
• A chatbot triage in place of the form — Family-law visitors need to feel that what they type is safe; a scripted chat asking the same sensitive questions felt to the partners like risk taken on without consent.
• Advertising harder to fill the consultation slots — Slots were capped and the problem was completion, not awareness — pressure on a fixed calendar would have produced rushed consults and worse outcomes for everyone.

How the work ran

Delivered by the experience pod — frontend engineer over 3 weeks, with working increments reviewed with the client every week.

The stack, and the reasoning

Hand-coded HTML/CSS

The page needed the firm's dignity at a fraction of the weight; hand-built markup ships in kilobytes and gives the partners something they can read and approve line by line.

Progressive form

The first step asks three answerable questions and the sensitive history arrives after the visitor has invested — which is precisely where the old form's abandoners were lost.

GA4 events

Step-level form events mean the next redesign argues from where anxious visitors actually leave, not from the partners' belief about which question scares people.

Consent Mode

Legal clients are exactly the audience that reads privacy language; Consent Mode keeps measurement compliant before consent and spared the firm a banner shouting over serious content.

What went wrong

How we worked together

Cadence

Two short calls a week with the managing partner and the intake coordinator; staging links carried the review weight between calls.

Client side

The intake coordinator owned the form's questions and their order; the managing partner approved tone and the disclaimer; the vendor was looped in only for routing.

Decisions

The coordinator decided what the form asks — her screening call is the process; the partner decided what the page may say, and that boundary held throughout.

They provided

The governing disclaimer text, the paper intake she trusts, analytics access for the step events, and twenty minutes of the vendor's time.

What changed

The headline: p75 lcp on practice-area pages, 28 days post-launch — 1.8s → 0.9s, read from CrUX field data. A second check: completed consult requests versus the prior quarter at +37%.

The form started asking the way the coordinator screens: gently, in order, one thing at a time. Completed requests arrive with enough context that her first call is a conversation instead of an interrogation, and the ambivalent visitors who used to vanish at the second section now stay through it. The partners noticed consult quality held while volume rose — which was the entire point of qualifying before booking. And the firm stopped treating its website as a brochure it pays someone to update.

The result was read from CrUX field data against the pre-engagement baseline over the stated window, with a guardrail check on completed consult requests versus the prior quarter. Where platform-reported numbers and business outcomes differ, this record says which layer it is quoting.

What they own now

• The page and form code in a repository the firm's vendor can be granted access to.
• The form-question rationale written by the coordinator for whoever follows her.
• GA4 step-level events plus a monthly one-page drop-off report she can read.
• The consent configuration with the privacy wording the partners approved.
• A routing note documenting exactly what the legacy vendor still owns.