The Challenge
Scarinci Hollenbeck is a full-service New Jersey and New York business law firm with practice areas spanning corporate law, real estate, employment, and government affairs. When they engaged Mettevo, their website was failing on multiple fronts: the design conveyed neither the gravitas of an established firm nor the approachability that modern legal clients expect when evaluating counsel for significant matters.
The core tension in law firm website design is a genuine one: legal authority and human warmth are typically treated as opposites, yet high-value clients need both before they'll make contact. The site also had critical technical gaps — slow load speeds, poor mobile responsiveness, and no structured lead capture — that were costing the firm real business every day.
Beyond the design, the firm needed a platform that its internal team could manage without developer support, while maintaining the security and performance standards expected of a practice handling sensitive corporate matters.
The Strategy
- React-powered frontend delivered a fast, interactive user experience — service pages, attorney profiles, and case study sections load instantly with no page refresh, keeping potential clients engaged rather than waiting
- WordPress CMS backend gave the firm's marketing team full editorial control over attorney bios, practice area content, news, and thought leadership — without touching code or filing a dev ticket
- Information architecture redesign restructured 200+ pages of legal content around how clients actually search for legal help — by practice area, industry, and legal situation — not how the firm internally categorised its work
- Conversion-focused form design replaced generic contact forms with practice-specific inquiry flows, capturing the right context upfront and routing enquiries to the appropriate partner automatically
- Mobile-first responsive design rebuilt every page component for smartphone and tablet first — critical in a market where executives increasingly research legal counsel on mobile during business travel
- Technical SEO and performance — structured data (LegalService, Attorney, FAQ schemas), Core Web Vitals compliance, and a clean internal linking structure built to compete for high-value legal search terms
The Results
Why this matters
Legal clients make high-stakes decisions. Before they pick up the phone or submit a form, they read. They evaluate. They compare. A law firm website design that fails to communicate both expertise and approachability within the first ten seconds loses those clients to a competitor who got the balance right.
Attorney website design is not about looking prestigious — it's about removing friction. The firm that makes it easiest to understand what you do, why you're different, and how to get started will win the consultation. Every UX decision on Scarinci Hollenbeck's site was made with that logic in mind.
The React + WordPress architecture was a deliberate technical choice. React gave the frontend the speed and interactivity that modern users expect — no full page reloads, smooth transitions between practice areas and attorney profiles. WordPress gave the team the editorial flexibility to publish thought leadership, update attorney bios, and manage news without developer involvement. Both layers work independently and scale separately.
If you're managing a law firm website design project — whether for a boutique practice or a multi-office firm — the Scarinci Hollenbeck case is a working example of how to resolve the authority-vs-approachability tension while delivering measurable commercial results.
