Industry: Collaborative family law
Project Duration: Ongoing
Initial Engagement Focus: Brand and digital presence relaunch
A collaborative law attorney’s website is often built the way every other family law site is built, then handed off to someone who never asks why. The language promises to fight for you. The practice areas page treats litigation as a core offering instead of the reluctant, occasional thing it actually is for a practice like this. None of it reflects work built specifically around not going to court, and prospective clients tend to notice the mismatch even when they can’t quite name it.
Starting with a definition, not a campaign
The first step, across a handful of these engagements, wasn’t a campaign. It was a definition: writing down, plainly, who the practice was actually for and who it wasn’t. That sounds obvious. It rarely exists anywhere on a collaborative law website, which tends to describe services instead of fit. Once that was clear, the practice areas pages could stop presenting litigation as a headline offering. Most collaborative attorneys handle it reluctantly, under duress, when a case genuinely can’t stay collaborative. Advertising it prominently sends the opposite signal from the one the practice actually wants to send. A website is advertising, and what it chooses to emphasize is a decision, not a formality.
Where clients actually look first
From there, the work moved to where prospective clients actually look before they ever call: Google Business Profile, Avvo, Yelp, LinkedIn. Each of these tends to drift out of sync with a firm’s real voice over time, an Avvo overview that reads like a directory listing, a Yelp presence nobody’s touched since it was claimed, a LinkedIn headline that says nothing a website visitor wouldn’t already assume. Bringing all of it into the same register, calm, direct, non-adversarial, meant that wherever someone found the practice first, they got the same impression: I like her, I trust her, I want to work with her.
A referral system built for how the field actually works
Referrals needed a different approach entirely. Collaborative law runs on a small, trusted network of other attorneys and neutrals, and almost none of the attorneys in that network are naturally comfortable asking for referrals directly, however much the work depends on them. Building a simple, low-pressure system for requesting and tracking recommendations did more for the pipeline than any content campaign would have, mostly because it worked with the field’s actual social dynamics instead of against them.
The person who isn’t in the room yet
The most delicate piece was onboarding, specifically the materials a prospective client would want to share with their own spouse. Collaborative divorce only works with two willing participants, and the person doing the research has usually already decided something the other spouse hasn’t. Reviewing what a prospect was actually being handed to pass along, and rebuilding it so it read as safe, clear, and genuinely informative rather than persuasive, mattered as much as anything on the website itself.
What the numbers said
None of this was dramatic to watch happen. In one of these engagements, the numbers told the story regardless: engagement rate on the redesigned site climbed from 46% to 57%, average time on site nearly doubled, and visitors started moving through more of the site instead of leaving after the homepage. People were staying long enough to actually read what the practice was telling them.
None of it required new positioning language or a rebrand. Mostly it required going through everything the practice already had, the website, the directory listings, the intake materials, and asking honestly whether each piece was still saying what the practice meant. Most weren’t, not because anyone had gotten it wrong on purpose, but because a collaborative practice inherits a language built for an adversarial one, and nobody budgets time to go back and fix that once the site is already live.