An International Law Firm Based in Washington, USA.

Originally named “Covington & Burling”, the organisation took the decision to simplify the company name to “Covington” in 2015. The rebranding project provided the perfect opportunity for the company to modernise their digital assets, not only stylistically, but also functionally. Having seen the work that 3chillies performed for Bird&Bird, Covington approached 3chillies with their initial requirements for a new website.

User-friendly, Responsive & Powerful

The old, unresponsive Covington & Burling website was built many years before on a content management system which no longer met the needs of the marketing department. It was clunky, very difficult to develop upon and offered no in-depth analytics or advanced marketing features. The website certainly wasn’t reflecting the fact that Covington had become the largest Law Firm in Washington, DC.

It was clear that the new website needed to provide far more than just a facelift. Covington required a user friendly, responsive, website which would be fast, scalable, and secure. It should offer advanced marketing functionality, it should be easy to build upon for future developments, and it should reflect Covington’s position as a leading Global Law Firm.

Two-Phase Launch Strategy 

The date for launching the new brand had already been decided upon before the building work commenced, so the decision was taken to build the new website in two phases.

Phase 1 would ensure that all of the old website content would be migrated over to the new platform in time for the brand relaunch.  The phase 1 website would hold a new homepage and a number of styling changes to reflect the core branding changes. 

Phase 2 would come about after the brand relaunch. It would encompass a full site redesign which would be determined through multiple client workshop meetings held in Washington.

Having received the templates and wireframes from design partners, DesignUK (now Constructive) 3chillies began the build, and executed both phases on time and within budget.

Impressive Features

SITECORE 8.1

The new site is built on Sitecore 8.1, the latest edition of Sitecore at the time of writing. This opens up a host of intelligent marketing techniques such as a/b split testing and personalisation. 

The site is hosted on Virtual Machines in Microsoft Azure, running on the IAAS (infrastructure as a service) framework – a cost efficient flexible, scalable, and secure environment. 

ADVANCED SEARCH WITH TAGGING

Search plays an important role on the new site. It was imperative that relevant lawyer bios were easy to find via a simple keyword search. Covington also required additional control over the search result listings. Making use of SOLR search technology, the marketing department can manually override the automatic prioritisation of search results to ensure that the more important results are always displayed first, for example, having the ability to display partners and lawyers in order of seniority. 

Tagging is also an important aspect of ensuring that the search feature surfaces the most relevant results, and filters on the results page allows for further search narrowing where necessary. 

MULTILINGUAL WITH LANGUAGE FALL-BACK

As a global company, the requirement for multilingual functionality was vital. Sitecore 8.1 makes light work of multilingual versioning, where multiple translations of each content piece are stored in the same location.

New features such as language fall-back have also been enabled, meaning that where translations are not yet available, results are automatically shown in their original language rather than being omitting altogether. 

SITECORE WORDPRESS INTEGRATION

Long before the new website plans were revealed, each practice area had a WordPress based knowledgebase.  This was an area for lawyers to publish legal information which would support their practise area, and help prospects find relevant information. 

Familiarity with the WordPress system meant that integrating it with Sitecore was a more popular choice than asking each contributor to make the shift to Sitecore publishing. As a result a tool called “Harvest” was created by 3chillies to crawl the RSS feeds of each WordPress website. Now, when information is published to the WordPress Sites, the information is automatically pulled through to Sitecore and automatically linked to the relevant lawyer bios. 

CREATING PDF BINDERS

With the PDF binder functionality, content from the website can be saved into a favourites section before being combined together into the form of a printable pdf binder. This functionality has proved very useful for both employees of Covington and their customers. 

A FRESH, USER-FRIENDLY, RESPONSIVE WEBSITE

The Covington website was delivered on time and within budget and 3chillies continue to work with the organisation under our Gold Support package.  The new site holds a fresh, modern look which is easy to navigate. 

Above: The New Covington Website

Above: The Old Covington Website

LARGE SCALE MIGRATION

In total, over 20,000 pages were migrated across from the old website platform to the new Sitecore website.

RESPONSIVE WEBSITE DESIGN

The new website now caters for in excess of 800,000 sessions per year. 18% of total website traffic is viewed through a mobile or tablet device, meaning that almost a fifth of the total traffic is benefitting from the new responsive website design. The site now meets Google’s requirements for providing a mobile friendly website, which has surely lead to an improvement in mobile search result rankings.

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