Sector(s)

Team Members

mmillford, doublecompile

Project Team

Rob Rhinehart
Taylor Kurtz

Visit the site

Visit the site

Organizations Involved

New England-based law firm Pierce Atwood LLP is nationally and internationally recognized for their expertise in class action litigation, energy production and distribution, mid-market mergers and acquisitions, information security and technology, commercial real estate development, and complex construction projects. At the outset of the engagement, Pierce Atwood was looking to update their brand identity from top to bottom. This included rebranding, new signage, a new website, and sophisticated email marketing.

About the project

Pierce Atwood had several goals for building a new website. One of the most important priorities for the team was to improve the user experience by adding a robust search feature on the home page. The design was slated for a refresh, rather than a complete redesign. The team also required a robust proposal builder capability that could be fully integrated with the core website.

Traditionally, law firm websites center their main points of navigation around attorneys and their practice areas. Mindgrub ensured that Pierce Atwood’s website followed this industry best practice, while also creating a large “What Can I Help you Find?” search box on the home page. This search field allows visitors to type in what they need help with. For example, if a user entered, “I need help with maritime law,” the search results would include the landing page of the maritime law practice, the attorneys in said practice, their sub-areas of expertise, related practice areas, related industries, industry news, and upcoming conference presentations.

The look and feel was built with a fresh, modern interpretation of their branding elements and colors. Each attorney in the firm has an improved profile page with a larger photo and layout, providing users with additional information that can help them make a decision.

Why Drupal was chosen

The Pierce Atwood/Mindgrub team considered WordPress and Drupal frameworks for Pierce Atwood’s new website. At the time, pierceatwood.com resided on a proprietary content management system (CMS) that was traditionally used by law firms. Pierce Atwood, however, wanted to move away from the restrictive nature and high maintenance costs of that CMS and move to an open source platform.

The new website was to be a typical informational website, so initially WordPress seemed to be the right fit. However, there were two new features that needed to be added: more robust search functionality and a dynamic proposal builder. Drupal could handle both of the capabilities, but WordPress could not meet the complex requirements of the dynamic proposal builder. The builder allowed Pierce Atwood to build proposal submissions from dynamically-generated web data, and was integrated fully with the core website on the Drupal platform.

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen

These modules helped us achieve the level of customization needed for Pierce Atwood’s website needs. Here’s what each one allowed us to do:

  • Context – customize the display based on numerous factors, such as the type of content being viewed
     
  • Display Suite – have granular control over the individual components involved in the site
     
  • Feeds – seamlessly migrate existing content
     
  • Search API Solr - provide robust search capabilities
     
  • Media – provide a rich interface for the upload and insertion of images and video into their content
     
  • Paragraphs – define a complex field schema, providing an intuitive interface for specifying the various pieces of data related to biographies, areas of expertise, and industry verticals
     
  • Views – build custom-tailored result sets with ease
     
  • Views Accordion – display content items in collapsible accordions with ease
     
  • Views Infinite Scroll – provide the customer an intuitive infinite scrolling behavior within lists of content
     
  • Views Responsive Grid – arrange the result sets in a responsive manner, ensuring consistent display across multiple form factors and devices
     
  • Workbench Moderation – establish a solid workflow process for content authored by multiple users
     
  • PhpWord Library (https://github.com/MaffooBristol/drupal-phpword) – create Microsoft Word compatible exports of content to be used in official proposals