Navigating Success: Enhancing MLT Aikins Usability and Engagement Through a Website Overhaul

Problem Statement

MLT Aikins, one of Canada’s largest full-service law firms, operates across six key centres in Western Canada with more than 300 lawyers to date. Seeking to reimagine the website experience, the firm prioritized accessibility, intuitive site navigation, and user-friendly functionality. The previous site was outdated, housed a large quantity of content, and lacked the necessary tools to connect clients and prospective clients with the people and information they needed. Making the site more accessible by integrating numerous tools effectively, adding easy site navigation, searchable content, and a directory of legal professionals, has allowed MLT Aikins to better serve clients and attract top tier talent. 
Key goals for the website project included:

• Accurately representing the firm’s brand and value offering to clients, showcasing the company culture and experience working with MLT Aikins.
• Attracting high quality talent (lawyers, students, management and staff).
• Improving navigation and search to encourage exploration of content and motivate potential clients to take action (download resources, contact, register for events, subscribe, etc.)
• A flexible system that allows for easy updates by administrators but also takes into account evolving client and firm needs.
• The ability to highlight videos and testimonials.
• A secure system that is proactively scanned and maintained on a regular basis.

What We Did

Phase 1: Discovery

The project started with a thorough discovery phase to further define project details and the features that will be delivered in the build phase. For this project, the priorities of the discovery were to:

• Engage and consult with lawyers, staff and clients of MLT Aikins to ensure their needs were documented and prioritized. 
• Develop a user-centric and research-based navigation and content strategy to optimize how users engaged with the site. 
• Determine a plan for integration with pre-existing systems, such as Hubspot, LawPay, Big Marker Webinars, and other tools being used by MLT Aikins.
• Create a plan for improved search.
• Develop a migration and redirect strategy.

Our research activities included stakeholder interviews, top tasks surveys, proto personas, technical audits and integration research, functional requirement definition, and others. From here, we provided MLT Aikins with a plan for the design and build phase, based on the key findings from the research, which set the stage for how the work would be executed. 

Phase 2: Design and Build

The design of the website balances professionalism with a welcoming, approachable feel. Subtle graphic accents and sophisticated design techniques create a distinctive aesthetic that sets it apart from traditional corporate websites, while staying true to the MLT Aikins brand and experience that clients expect.

For the development phase, it was important that MLT Aikins would maintain control over the content of the site and the independence to update it themselves; therefore, we built the site with WordPress CMS, and built page components in a way that would allow them to revise content without the need of a developer. This included subtle front-end development to set up templates and components just right, so aspects of the site could be added in a playful way that worked with other content pieces. 
Considering the firm’s high volume of content, the website needed a powerful and customizable search tool; thus, Algolia search was introduced, and is where our development team really flexed its technical muscles. Integration into the MLT Aikins site with its unique pagebuilder components and customized fields meant additional time had to be invested to ensure the Algolia search ability was maximized and was able to search all aspects of the site. While this integration proved to be difficult at first, it became one of the most rewarding tasks of the project for our developers, who were able to build a fully customized solution for MLT Aikins. 

Further development enhancements included:

• Improved call-to-action (CTA) elements for events to make them more prominent and user-friendly, encouraging increased engagement. 
• UI updates to create an easier navigation experience for site users. 
• Newly created features throughout the site for high conversion pages, including an insights library, legal professionals directory, and tailored careers and recruitment pages.
• Integration with BigMarker webinar platform, where MLT Aikins could manage webinar registrations, selling of tickets, and pushing through webinar details to the end user. 
• A custom Indigenous landing page to improve consultation with Indigenous groups.
• Newly introduced taxonomies based on findings from research, allowing for more engaged and tailored filtering across the website.

Outcomes

The result is a friendly and inviting website that seamlessly connects MLT Aikins’s clients and prospects with the information they need. Its intuitive navigation ensures ease of use, while a streamlined content management system allows the firm to update editorial content effortlessly, keeping everyone informed and up to date.