Lax O'Sullivan Lisus Gottlieb LLP: Website

Lax O’Sullivan Lisus Gottlieb is a premier litigation law firm known for winning some of the most high-profile cases in Canada. They are a well-known, highly respected law firm that is willing to infuse a little humour and creativity into their marketing materials. For years, they have put together some of the wittiest, most irreverent holiday cards around and they are always willing to be avant-garde in their messaging. The firm’s previous website was well received and the couch theme (the homepage had all the lawyers sitting on a couch) was often imitated but never quite duplicated. Prior to the firm’s new website, clients who visited the firm would regularly ask about the couch, even though, thanks to the powers of Photoshop, there is no couch and never was. The challenge for Lax O’Sullivan was that although the site was pretty to look at, it was difficult to maintain and didn’t really say much about the firm or how they helped their clients.

The firm approached Cubicle Fugitive with the intent of building a new website that conveyed a similar level of brand awareness and would garner a similar amount of “street cred” but be very functional and client-friendly. Lax O’Sullivan was looking for a partner that could design and build a highly-functional website that was easy-to-administer, but completely unique in design and branding. They wanted a campaign that highlighted their exceptional litigation experience without taking themselves too seriously. The new campaign would need to be extendible across their business collateral and communications, feel fresh and unique, while also being timeless enough to reflect the firm for the foreseeable future.

As we do with all our clients, our first step is to embark on an extensive client discovery process. We wanted to know why LOLG is different. What did the lawyers say about themselves and what did others say about them? We took a broad look at current and upcoming competitors, delved into why firms consistently recommend LOLG or refer clients their way. We quickly realized we were dealing with a different type of firm, one highly respected in their field, and very competent in the world of high-stakes litigation. We also quickly identified that, although they take their work very seriously, they don’t necessarily take themselves that way.

The challenge was to design a new overall “look and feel” for the firm without officially rebranding them. To accomplish this goal, we developed a new marketing and brand campaign about how “when ‘it’ hits the fan, Lax O’Sullivan is the firm to call.

We developed a series of campaign banners that incorporate witty headlines with clever animation to tell a simple story in a matter of seconds. Subtle touches of retro-infused 3D objects are used both on the homepage and throughout the interior to help emphasize the firm’s unique brand.

While we love the sizzle, we know the steak is more important. We went on to design and develop a simple, elegant new website that included succinct and articulate copy and minimalist design. As part of any law firm website we design, we paid particular attention to the lawyer biographies. For the Lax O’Sullivan site, we designed a very pleasing visual look that is also very functional and utilizes the entire screen width and compartmentalizes relevant information in tabs. We art directed large, minimalist, and modern photos and wrote impactful new biography copy.

As we do with many of our busy law firms, we assisted with the writing of much of the site content from catchy headlines to informative and succinct interior page material. Lax O’Sullivan’s previous site did not have any practice area content, so we assisted with the development of each area.

To address the firm’s desire for a more functional and administrative-friendly website, we built the new website on Sitefinity, which is a very powerful tool for website management. Now their site is highly secure, easy to maintain, scalable and very user and search-engine friendly. We provided Lax O’Sullivan with a full suite of tools to fully manage their website including biography management, practice area management, the ability to upload and organize images and documents, and a fully-featured publication module that can house presentations, publications, news, events, and blogs. We provided a full 360° Legal Management tool.

About 30% of traffic to law firm websites comes from mobile, most notably phones (~5% tablets). Although not quite at the threshold of other types of sites, we feel having a strategically designed mobile experience is paramount to a successful website. With Lax O’Sullivan, we took great care to ensure that the site worked both on a desktop and on any mobile device that may be viewing it. We designed three separate views for bios, a full-screen layout with full image and tabs for content, an intermediate view for tablets that forgoes the full-screen image and reorients all the data into a more compact container, and a mobile view that ensures the most important information is at the top and allows for scrolling to reach any auxiliary information. All in all, the mobile design is very striking, easy to navigate, and very client-friendly.

To complement the legal management functionality, we also built Lax O’Sullivan a very robust mandate module that houses all their big wins. This module contains all the necessary information for any cases that the firm deems newsworthy and can be made public. You can interlink these mandates with all areas of the website including news, bios, and practice areas.