Hubbard One helps DWF lift its online game with refreshed website presence

Hubbard One, the premier provider of law firm marketing and business development solutions, helps DWF, a leading full service law firm based in the North of England, strengthen its online presence, successfully positioning the firm as a highly professional but very approachable organisation.

DWF is a growing firm with an ambition to be one of the top-30 law firms in the UK by 2010. It realised its existing brochure website was inadequate in terms of functionality and in need of updating to reflect the Firm’s brand.

“We knew we needed to refresh the site in order to better reflect our changing brand,” says Zoë Uddgren-Young, Marketing Manager for DWF. “We wanted it to be a stronger source of information about the firm and for it to play a more fundamental part in any integrated marketing campaigns we launched to further our growth.”

Uddgren-Young says the firm approached Hubbard One to design and build the website based on its close alliance with fellow Thomson Reuters business, Elite and because of its strong reputation and experience implementing other leading law firm sites.

“We are in the process of implementing our new Practice Management solution with Elite and wanted to make sure that our new website would have the ability to integrate with this in the future as we are planning to introduce ecommerce functionality on the site at a later date.”

Hubbard One undertook a site redesign and leveraged some of DWF’s unique imagery, which included light-hearted images of partners and lawyers, to create an engaging home page and lawyer biography section.

“The images relate to the personal hobbies or interests of each individual lawyer. We believe it gives the firm a very human face, which we feel is paramount in a business driven by personal relationships,” Uddgren-Young says.

Hubbard One also improved DWF’s ability to support event management via the site. The firm stages a large number of workshops and seminars on a variety of legal and commercial topics and the process for individuals to register for such functions is now much more seamless.

Also important is the site’s content management system that is much easier to use than the firm’s previous solution. Updates can be quickly added with minimum fuss by the marketing team, making it far easier to maintain.

“We purchased Hubbard One’s Web Center product because we knew it would better enable us to connect with our target audiences. Over the longer term we want to integrate the site with email marketing, contact management and our financial system. ”

A significant part of Hubbard One’s work was spent updating the careers section of the site, something which Uddgren-Young says the firm is already making good use of.

“We recently undertook a marketing campaign to raise the profile of our brand and recruit new staff. We were able to provide URL links back to the careers section of the site, so people who were interested in learning more about the values of the firm and the employment opportunities that existed, could gain more in-depth information very easily.”

This new solution has helped DWF to generate almost 100 direct recruitment enquiries during the first six months of operation, with around 10% of these going on to secure employment with the firm.

Uddgren-Young says the firm is also keen to establish new media features on the site.

“We are currently doing a lot of research into blogs, webinars, online video and other media solutions. We are keen to understand how these new technologies can provide us with a means of differentiating our client service. There have been a lot of developments in this area, but what we like about Hubbard One is that they think about what will add value to the client rather than simply looking at what the technology can do.”

< Back to Newsletter

Click to Download the PDF



Hubbard One's Innovation Forum
20th - 23rd October 2009