The updated look and feel of the McCarthy Tétrault LLP website wins points in our books for its info-rich homepage and the navigation prominence of student-focussed content.
We wanted to know more about how the redesign came about, and what kinds of online applications and initiatives are in the works for the firm, so we asked Maud Cantin, Manager, Communications for McCarthys, for the details.
How does the new site correspond to McCarthys’ recent rebranding? What do you hope the new site says about the firm?
We are continuously improving our website, so we don’t consider the current site to be a new website. Rather, the recent changes were to further align it with our brand and integrate our new visual identity. We revisited our firm’s visual identity approach to address specific issues raised during market research, such as a need to differentiate the firm and to better support our efforts in the marketplace.
Our goal was to visually express our client and market focus. Our imagery logo, which integrates mainly client industries, products, services or geographies, and sometimes community engagement, conveys the idea that our client’s business and reality is part of us, part of our own identity. It will also be an extension of our daily efforts to enrich and deepen our client relationships and to build a strong team with our clients as essential members.
During our extensive research with the student population and younger firm members, we heard that there was an opportunity for us to present a more energized image. It was also important to us to better align our image with who we are: an energetic firm that is continuously evolving and improving itself. We have made some bold moves in the past to build a stronger firm for the next generations, and we will continue to do so.
On a practical level, we wanted a visual approach that would take advantage of the digital environment and would be more flexible when used in different situations, such as when we want to be more understated or when we need to magnify our visual impact and stand out in a crowded environment.
How long did the site take to design and build?
We rebuilt our corporate website about six years ago, and since then we have never stopped improving and evolving it. So it is really a continuous-improvement approach for the internal and external multifunctional team that contributes to its development. This summer, we focused on the graphic elements of the site to integrate our new visual identity and express with more impact some of the fundamental elements, which I outlined in my previous answer: the idea that client realities are part of our own identity, a sense of transparency and energy, etc. We also took the opportunity to improve a few functional elements to make it easier for us to update the site when and as required. And finally, we have done something we have wanted to do for a while, which is to bring our student and recruitment website under our main website infrastructure and visual identity/brand platforms.
Your new site has a real web-portal look and feel. What’s the motivation behind that?
We see our site as the main hub to share knowledge with our clients, to promote our people and expertise, to collect data and comments from users about their preferences and what they find useful, and to reach out to the market globally. The possibilities are really endless, and we are looking to do much more in terms of knowledge-sharing.
Links to pages relevant to law students get pride of place in your main navigation bar and on the home page itself. Why is that important to the firm?
It has always been important to us to build an online environment where students can easily access any type of information about the firm and our people while knowing there is also a place that addresses their specific needs. This way, it is easy for them to move back and forth between the corporate site, which provides them with integrated information and knowledge on what we do at the firm and how we do it, and the student site, which is there to answer more specific questions.
Many firms are working to add more dynamic content, mobile access, blogs and social media tie-ins to their online presence. This kind of content does not seem to be a major focus for your firm. Why not?
Where online communications are concerned, the possibilities are endless. There is a real opportunity to enhance our dialogue capabilities within the marketplace but it also constitutes significant challenges from a resource allocation and management perspective. So we take our time evaluating the potential of the different tools out there. We rarely jump on the latest application just because it is new or because we want to be first. We focus on the quality of the content, its ability to deliver to our clients and stakeholders, and whether it provides meaningful opportunities for dialogue with our communities. We do post CLE videos on our public website; we introduced a RSS feed because it was important to us to deliver timely information in the marketplace, and we think about the experience on a mobile platform when we introduce new content.
It is the same approach we take with social media. Several of our lawyers are active on Twitter, Linkedin and other social media sites. For example, one of our lawyers, Barry Sookman, blogs and posts to Twitter extensively. We’re currently evaluating the social media tools our clients are using with the goal of developing a more comprehensive social media strategy that will meet their needs. Our goal is to ensure we are engaging with our clients and communities in ways that are most effective for them.
We also conducted a joint seminar with Edelman this year in Montréal on the opportunities and challenges of social media, and invited the Legal and Marketing clients to the session to help them bridge the gap between the marketing and legal perspectives on Social Media. It was quite a success and we will be conducting it in Toronto in November.
Can you give us some insight on where the firm next plans to take its online brand?
Our online brand is extremely large in scope. It encompasses our websites as well as our client extranets, our relationship and direct marketing, and our social media presence. Considering this, it is important for us to focus on a few things we want to do extremely well: further enhance our knowledge-sharing capabilities online, refine our relationship-marketing approach, and improve the manner in which we contribute to social media.
Does your firm have a great online look? Tell us about it and we could profile your website on our blog.