Putting the Power Back in the Hands of a Global Law Firm’s Marketing Team

The Potential

Withers has a reputation that is built on deep expertise and long-standing client relationships across private wealth, high net worth individuals, family law, tax, trusts, litigation and corporate matters. With over 180 partners, 1,200 staff and offices spanning London, New York, Geneva, Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo and beyond, the firm operates at a truly international scale.

However, the existing website and marketing operations did not reflect the calibre of the business behind it. Key challenges included:

• Rigid templates and page layouts that gave editors little control over how content was structured and presented.
• No approval or publishing workflows, leaving global contributors without clear oversight or quality control
• Heavy developer dependency for even routine content changes, reducing marketing agility and responsiveness
• Limited multilingual management across eight languages, including Japanese and Chinese, with manual processes creating bottlenecks
• Poor scalability for future integrations withCRM, webinar platforms, podcasts and email marketing systems
• Significant risk in maintaining SEO performance during the migration of over 24,000 pages

The opportunity was bigger than a ‘just a new website’. We saw the potential to create a digital platform that could support global publishing at pace, reinforce brand consistency across 17 offices and provide a foundation for the next phase of Withers’ digital growth.

The Insight

For international professional services firms, digital credibility is inseparable from brand credibility. Clients expect seamless, timely access to expert insight across multiple geographies and languages, supported by intuitive and authoritative digital channels.

And people sit at the heart of that experience.. The ability to connect lawyers with their expertise, insights, track records and client successes was central to the digital experience. The website needed to make those connections visible, navigable and meaningful, turning a large, complex global practice into something a prospective client could relate to and engage with.

Creating a better client experience wasn't enough. The marketing team needed the freedom to manage, evolve and publish content independently, without relying on developers for everyday changes. The platform had to work just as hard for the people behind the website as it did for the people using it.

The Idea

Our ambition was to create a people-centred digital platform that reflected the quality and scale of Withers as a global law firm, while making expertise easier to discover and content easier to manage. By bringing together people, expertise, insight and business systems within a flexible digital platform, we created an experience that serves both prospective clients and the marketing team responsible for keeping it relevant.

The Technology

A scalable, enterprise-grade digital experience platform built on the Kentico DXP, designed for global content management, multilingual publishing and seamless integration with core business systems.

The platform combines flexible content management, multilingual publishing and enterprise integration within a single digital ecosystem. Editors can create, clone, preview and publish content, using  modular templates and structured workflows, reducing developing dependency while maintaining governance and brand consistency across global teams.

Key capabilities include:

• Structured content architecture with flexible, reusable templates and modular components, enabling editors to build high-impact pages independently while maintaining brand integrity across all markets
• Full multilingual support across eight languages, including Japanese and Chinese, with scalable multi-locale infrastructure designed to grow with the firm’s international footprint
• A bespoke People Tool API connecting Kentico to the internal employee database, enabling automatic profile updates, change notifications and real-time content relationships between people, insights, expertise areas and track records
• Advanced bespoke search delivering categorised, contextual results filtered by content type, service area, experience and region, giving users relevant, meaningful results rather than generic listings
• Automated content migration via a custom API integration with the legacy CMS, successfully migrating over 24,000 pages while preserving complex inter-content relationships and saving thousands of hours of manual effort
• Integration with LexisNexis InterAction for CRM, Tikit eMarketing for email campaigns, Active Directory for authentication, and Cloudinary for centralised digital asset management
• Responsive, mobile-first design with intuitive dynamic navigation that adapts seamlessly across devices, incorporating micro-interactions and visual dynamism to reflect the modern, progressive nature of the firm
• SEO migration strategy including automated redirect mapping and analytics continuity, ensuring search equity was protected throughout the transition
• Enterprise-grade hosting with resilience, disaster recovery and business continuity, alongside penetration testing and WCAG AA and ADA accessibility compliance
• Cookie management through Civic Cookie Control,alongside Google Tag Manager and Google
• Analytics integration for comprehensive performance measurement

Together, this creates a platform that operates as a true digital hub connecting people, expertise, content, search and business systems into a single, scalable ecosystem that the marketing team can manage with confidence.

The Impact

The new Withers Worldwide website delivered immediate, measurable performance gains across traffic, engagement and search visibility:

• 31% increase in website traffic year-on-year
• 30% of all traffic from new users, demonstrating expanded reach and audience acquisition
• 23% increase in session times, reflecting deeper, more meaningful engagement with content
• 6% reduction in bounce rate, confirming that visitors are finding relevant content faster and exploring further

Beyond the headline engagement metrics, the programme delivered significant improvements in search performance, with keyword rankings rising sharply across the firm’s core service areas:

• “International law firm” from #33 to #9
• “Immigration lawyers” from #15 to #3
• “Divorce lawyer” from #15 to #8
• “Family lawyer” from #42 to #10
• “Divorce solicitors” from #101 to #18

The automated content migration saved thousands of hours of manual work while preserving the complex, interconnected content relationships that are critical to a professional services website of this scale. Editors can now clone, preview and publish content directly within the CMS, with structured workflows providing governance without compromising speed.

What began as a CMS replacement has become a scalable digital foundation, a platform that reinforces Withers’ position as a modern, global legal brand, empowers its marketing team to deliver better content faster, and establishes the infrastructure for continued digital growth including marketing automation, personalisation and deeper system integration.

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