Commercial
Websites for commercial law firms.
A commercial client does not have a legal problem. They have a business problem that has become legal, and they are deciding whether you understand the business. Almost every commercial firm’s website answers that by listing its departments, which is an organogram, not an argument.
The example website
- Firm
- Hadley & Baxendale Inc
- Practice
- Commercial
- Pages, all of them working
- 6 pages
The example site
Hadley & Baxendale Inc
Commercial · Rosebank, Johannesburg · 6 pages
Eleven people in Rosebank, Johannesburg — four directors and five associates. Six pages, all of them working.
The firm is invented — the name comes out of a law textbook — and every page of the site says so at the top. Everything else on it is real: every link goes somewhere, and every page is written.
What a commercial website has to do
Speak in the client’s sector, not in your departments
A supply agreement in manufacturing and an offtake agreement in agriculture are the same area of law and nothing like the same conversation. A reader who finds their own industry named has already decided you have done this before; a reader who finds “Commercial · Litigation · Property” has to take it on trust.
Give a price, or explain why there cannot be one
Businesses buy against budget. A firm that will not indicate a number is asking to be compared on nothing, and gets compared on hourly rate, which is the worst ground it could choose. Publishing fixed prices for the work that can be scoped is a competitive act, not a disclosure.
Look like it was made for people who read for a living
This reader spends the day inside documents. Cramped type, low-contrast grey, a hero photograph of a glass building — these register as a firm that does not notice detail, which is the only thing they are buying. Typography carries weight in this market in a way it does in almost no other.
Show the work, not adjectives about the work
“Pragmatic, commercial, partner-led” appears on every commercial firm’s website in the country and distinguishes none of them. A short, specific account of a matter — what the problem was, what was done, what it cost — does the job three paragraphs of positioning cannot.
Three decisions, and why
Each picture below is a screenshot of a real page on that site, not a drawing of one.
The home page is an index of industries
Manufacturing, agriculture, retail and franchising, professional services, technology — each with the four things that actually come up in it and one line about the difficult one. Not a list of departments. A reader scanning for their own business finds it in about two seconds.
Four ways to be charged, and hourly is the last of them
Fixed fee for most contract work, capped fee for transactions, a monthly retainer for ongoing advice, hourly for litigation only — each with what it is for and why. The page says out loud that an hourly rate asks a business to carry a risk the firm is better placed to price.
The contract work is priced on the page
A shareholders agreement for two to five holders at R28,000, standard terms of supply at R18,500, a franchise agreement reviewed for a franchisee at R16,000, a POPIA baseline from R38,000 — each with what is included. Marked as illustrations on the example site; on a real one it would carry the date it took effect.
What it costs
Rebuilding the site you have is R8,500. A new one is R12,500 for a sole practitioner and R18,000 for two to five attorneys. Looking after it afterwards is from R1,950 a month. Every figure is published, so you can hold it against anybody else’s quote without asking us first.
Questions
- Our clients come from referrals and relationships. Does a website matter?
- It matters most in exactly that case. A referral is a name, and the first thing that happens to a name is that it gets searched — usually by somebody junior preparing a shortlist for somebody senior. The site is not the introduction; it is the confirmation, and it is the only part of it you control.
- We act across every sector. Does sector-led structure not narrow us?
- It narrows the page, not the practice. The example site names five industries and says plainly that everything else is referred out, which reads as judgement rather than as a limit. If you would rather name eight, that is a content decision and costs nothing.
- Our directors will not agree on the copy. How long does that take?
- We write it, you correct it. That is a far shorter argument than a blank page, and it is how these five were built. In practice it is two rounds of comments over a couple of weeks.
- Who owns it?
- You do. The domain is registered in your firm’s name from the first day, the content and photographs are yours, and so is the data the site collects. Twelve months, then month to month on sixty days’ notice.
Read next
Send us your firm’s web address.
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