Hancock Estabrook Law

A New Law Firm Website Design for a Century Old Firm

Hancock Estabrook was founded in 1889 and remains a law firm in upstate New York with offices in downtown Syracuse.  The firm's team of more than 50 attorneys serves a variety of industries and practice areas, and has built a celebrated reputation not just for their legal work but also as a best place to work in New York.

The firm's previous site had become dated and was not converting well, and with their move to a new, modern office building, they thought it was a good opportunity to also reposition their primary outward marketing tool, their website.  Hancock Estabrook found NMC due to our other law firm website design work around the country and both quickly realized it would be a great fit to work together.

The goals for the new site were to embrace Hancock Estabrook's long history and track record of success, while also projecting they're a modern law firm making a real impact today.  Additionally, it was essential to show the firm's depth in a variety of areas and position its attorneys as experts and valuable counsel for clients.

A Dynamic Team of Experts

The firm wanted to make it clear to visitors that they have a deep and dynamic team who can help clients in a number of industries and areas of expertise.  The feature area of the site allows the firm to quickly highlight top-level news, events, and developments, including introducing their new space to longtime clients.  Below that is a visual grid of practice areas to both quickly give visitors an understanding of Hancock Estabrook's breadth while also providing access to priority areas of practice.  The highlighted Professionals on the page are curated by the firm.

To reinforce the firm's depth and experience, the site aims to connect a number of different pieces of content throughout.  NMC worked to avoid siloed areas of content, establishing each section as its own hub to highlight the firm's experience and other related content. 

For example, each Practice Area highlights related attorneys, associated practice areas, relevant news and resources, and more.  The page is laid out in a way that visitor can not only understand the core services of that practice area but also easily dive deeper into more content.  Additionally, just by simply highlighting the different related content sections, visitors immediately understand the dynamism and depth of the firm.  Individual bios, resources, and other pieces of content are approached in a similar fashion.

This connected content helps not just with potential clients, but also with search engine optimization, as Google is able to easily crawl the different pages, associate them with specific practices, and boost their authority due to the inrenal links.  All of this content is easily managed through WordPress Content Management System, on which the firm site runs, letting administrators intuitively tag pieces of content to the relevant areas and it automatically feeds to those sections.

Delivering Results

The new site not only helped reposition the firm, but it also succeed in its efforts as a business development tool.  With the new design, search engine optimization work, and additional development, the firm experienced an immediate boost in leads coming through their website.  The site helped attract new visitors and more effectively worked them through the funnel to convert. 

NMC and Hancock Estabrook have continued the collaboration to work on internal tools for the firm and also continue gathering data on the site's performance and working to improve its search engine ranking, usability, and conversions.