FAQs

Great Jakes is a website and brand design agency that exclusively serves law firms.

We offer end-to-end design and technology development services. This means that our in-house team of strategists, designers, and developers handles all work. We are a one-stop shop.

Our services include brand strategy, brand positioning, logo and brand design, website strategy, UX design, CMS development, and data migration. Additionally, we provide ongoing hosting and maintenance of your website.

In short, we’re a team of experienced professionals who help law firms craft brands and websites that are clear, credible, and designed to support real business development.

More information about our service offerings can be found here: What We Do.

Most of our work is with mid-sized and large law firms (typically with 50-1500 lawyers) across the United States and Canada.

Our best clients are those with complex messaging challenges and high expectations around design quality, site performance, and technical execution.

Case studies describing our recent work can be found here: Our Results.

• Strategy first. We align stakeholders on goals, audiences, positioning, and proof points before design begins. This ensures that design decisions are guided by strategic criteria, not personal preference.
• One integrated team. Strategy, design, and development are delivered by our in-house team, reducing handoffs and improving quality and speed.
• Technology designed to differentiate. Our Attorney Microsites and Engagement Modules help attorneys and practices surface more substantial value that keeps visitors exploring.
• Deep legal experience. We serve only law firms. So, we understand the quirks of law firm culture and how to navigate the pitfalls to deliver a smooth, successful project. 

We design and build websites with the expectation that firms will change.

Our CMS architecture is modular and scalable, which makes it easier to add new practices, attorneys, industries, offices, or content types without disrupting the overall structure. This is especially important for firms that are growing, merging, or evolving their service mix.

Whether you are launching a new practice group, integrating attorneys from an acquisition, or expanding into new markets, the site is built to accommodate growth without requiring a redesign.

Great Jakes works exclusively with law firms and has done so for over two decades. That experience shapes everything we do. Because we focus only on the legal industry, we enter each client engagement with a deep understanding of how law firms operate and what it takes to craft credible, usable, and effective brands and websites for them.

Great Jakes’s Content Management System (CMS), known as the Rainmaker CMS, is built on WordPress. Over many years, we have made significant improvements to the default WordPress system to meet the specific needs of larger law firms.

There are no licensing fees (initially or ongoing) for the Rainmaker CMS, as it was built exclusively with open-source technologies (e.g., WordPress, PHP, and React).

One unique aspect of the CMS is its “headless” architecture, which separates the backend database from the website’s frontend, thereby significantly improving performance and security.

Yes. Nearly every website we launch integrates with third-party technologies, including CRMs (e.g., Concep, HubSpot, Peppermint, Nexl), intranets (e.g., SharePoint, Infodash), email marketing systems (e.g., Mailchimp, Vuture, Constant Contact), cookie consent tools for data privacy compliance (e.g., OneTrust, CookieYes), and proposal generator platforms (e.g., Intapp, Foundation, ikaun).

Depending on your needs, we are able to push data from the website to other platforms (e.g., a CRM) or ingest data into the website that resides elsewhere (e.g., the firm’s intranet). Either can be achieved via flat file or live feed (e.g., XML, JSON). 

We’ll work with you to design the cleanest, most practical integration method based on the available data, business requirements, and security standards.

Most attorney bios are built on rigid templates that confine lawyers to a single page or a fixed set of tabs. Great Jakes offers a much more flexible approach: the Attorney Microsite.

The Attorney Microsite approach turns each lawyer’s bio into a small, customizable website that fits seamlessly within the larger firm website. This lets you add as many tabs or pages as needed and publish whatever content best supports an attorney’s business development goals. 

Attorney Microsites allow a lawyer to showcase deeper, more comprehensive proof of expertise than conventional website bios do. Furthermore, each Attorney Microsite can be tailored to that lawyer’s specific audience and business development goals, which may vary widely from one lawyer to the next.

For more about Attorney Microsites, and the characteristics of modern law firm bios, read this article: The Evolution of the Law Firm Bio.

Dynamic content teasing keeps visitors engaged by automatically suggesting additional relevant content such as articles, blog posts, podcasts, case studies, and videos. Content-teasing technology

• Maximizes visibility. Suggested-content teasers increase the number of people who encounter your content, which in turn boosts the ROI of your thought-leadership efforts.
• Increases engagement. Displaying links to fresh, relevant content across your site encourages visitors to keep clicking and spending more time in your ecosystem.
• Eliminates dead ends. No page should be a stopping point. When a visitor finishes reading a bio or article, offering related content keeps them learning about your firm’s experience and capabilities instead of exiting the site.

The User Engagement Toolbox is an award-winning set of features that make law firm websites more “sticky” and thus, more effective. It does this by allowing website content teams to tease content and easily highlight key information.

A key component of the User Engagement Toolbox is sidebar widgets. Using simple drag-and-drop tools, new widgets can be created in seconds. The widgets have a variety of forms and functions, but fall into three main categories

• Suggested Content Teasers. These widgets allow you to promote your best reputation-enhancing content, such as articles, blog posts, and case studies. You can manually curate these teasers or select “automatic mode” to employ the system’s content teasing algorithm to automatically tease relevant content.
• Calls to Action. These widgets encourage users to take an action such as registering for an event, subscribing to a newsletter, or contacting someone for more information. 
• Information Highlights. These widgets can draw attention to the most important information on a page. With just a few clicks, you can add content such as videos, photos, pull-quotes, and testimonials.

For more on this topic, read our whitepaper: High-engagement Law Firm Websites.

Yes. Hosting and ongoing maintenance are part of a managed service relationship we have with all clients. This service includes a secure hosting environment, performance monitoring, daily backups, security patches, and routine software updates.

Our technical team continuously monitors and tunes your website and its hosting environment to maintain peak performance. If automated threats or suspicious traffic hit the site, which is routine on today’s internet, our security stack, including services like Cloudflare and server-level protections, is designed to detect and block them automatically. If anything requires human attention, our monitoring immediately alerts our team to step in.

After launch, clients receive high-touch support from Great Jakes. You’ll have a direct line to a seasoned producer who serves as your dedicated point of contact. That means you’re working with a senior-level professional who understands your site, your goals, and your internal workflow. There is no generic support queue.

React or ReactJS is a modern frontend technology that enables instantaneous page loads and smooth, seamless page transitions (among other benefits).

Additionally, this technology (which is used by major platforms such as Netflix, Facebook, and The New York Times) enables sites to meet Google’s page-speed requirements and thus strengthens SEO performance. 

Great Jakes’s implementation of React has also enabled a decoupled server architecture that significantly reduces the vulnerability of your website’s backend systems and improves overall website security and stability.

Here are links to a whitepaper and article that we’ve written to read more about our thinking on this subject

ReactJS: The New, New Thing for Law Firm Websites

Performance Is Your Brand

All websites we create are “Google-ready.” That means your site is built with the technical and structural fundamentals needed to rank well in Google (and other search engines), without requiring a third-party SEO firm. We achieve this by implementing a strong foundation with

• Performance-focused architecture to support Google’s Core Web Vitals.
• Clean semantic structure (H-tag headings, navigation, internal linking) to clarify page hierarchy.
• XML sitemap generation and search-engine-friendly crawling controls.
• Structured data (Schema.org) to improve indexing accuracy.
• CMS-level SEO controls for titles, slugs/URLs, and meta descriptions.

“AI Visibility” (also called AEO, GEO, AIO, and AISO) is about making your content easier for AI answer engines (like ChatGPT and Perplexity) to find, understand, and trust.

We support this by structuring content clearly, especially on attorney and practice pages, by surfacing proof points in predictable sections, by strengthening internal linking between related topics, and by implementing structured data (Schema.org) to reduce ambiguity. Great Jakes’s Attorney Microsites and Engagement Modules also help organize depth and make expertise much easier to interpret.

To understand more about our thinking on this subject, please read this article we’ve written:  AI Visibility and Attorney Bios

All Great Jakes sites are built, by default, to integrate with Google Analytics.  Additionally, the Great Jakes Rainmaker CMS includes a proprietary analytics dashboard called Rainmaker Stats, which extracts marketing data from Google Analytics and presents key insights in an easy-to-use interface for legal marketers. 

If your firm prefers to use another analytics platform, we can easily integrate with it.

Yes. The Great Jakes CMS is designed to be easy to use, but comprehensive training (and support) is provided. Training includes role-based walkthroughs, a module-by-module overview of key features, and documentation. Additionally, we always record the CMS training sessions, so that the firm can use them as a resource ongoing.

Yes. Great Jakes builds websites to align with ADA accessibility guidelines, targeting WCAG 2.1 Level AA. This includes meeting color-contrast requirements, ensuring that all functionality works via keyboard, and confirming compatibility with screen readers.

To support this, we implement accessibility best practices such as semantic structure, ARIA labels where appropriate, and page landmarks to help assistive technologies understand and navigate content. When brand colors don’t meet contrast thresholds, we provide compliant alternatives (or implement a high-contrast mode, if necessary). We also add user controls—such as pause buttons for any auto-playing homepage animations that include text.

To help ensure compliance, Great Jakes reviews sites thoroughly using both automated and manual testing.

Yes. Programmatic content migration is a core competency of our team and is part of nearly every website project we deliver.

Our process starts by working with your team to determine what content should move to the new site. We then create detailed migration specifications that outline exactly what will be migrated and how it will be done. Once those specs are approved, we build scripts to automate the transfer. After migration, we validate and test the content thoroughly to ensure accuracy, formatting integrity, and proper functionality.

Yes, Great Jakes offers optional modules that make it easy to compile website content into pitch materials and proposals.

Export/Proposal Module. This module lets users instantly generate polished, neatly formatted Microsoft Word documents containing key website content—such as attorney biographies, practice-area pages, and case studies—branded with the client’s logo and ready for proposal use. An optional add-on, Auto PDF, creates a PDF version of an attorney’s bio and displays it via a “Download Bio” button on the profile page. Auto PDF can be optionally configured for other modules, if desired.

RFP Matters Database. This feature supports proposal and RFP responses by organizing matter information in one place and making it easily searchable. It can store both non-public details (e.g., matter number, presiding court, internal notes) and public-facing descriptions, making it easier to manage, search, and retrieve the right content quickly when responding to RFPs.

Absolutely. Brand design, brand strategy, and brand positioning are core service offerings of our agency. Examples of our brand-strategy and brand-design work (e.g., logos, color schemes) can be found in the Results section of our website.

Yes. Great Jakes’ Integrated Blogs & Podcasts Module offers numerous benefits over traditional standalone blogs.

This module is built directly into the firm’s main website, using the same database and CMS toolset. This architecture fully weaves blog and podcast content into the overall site experience. For example:

• An attorney’s bio can include full blog posts and podcast episodes (not only links).
• Site search will include blog posts, podcasts, and other website content.
• Blog posts and podcasts are included in the site’s content-teasing algorithm. This means that the content will be automatically promoted across the site.

Yes. Great Jakes offers a Satellite Site Module that enables firms to manage small websites within the same CMS as their main site. Satellite sites are typically configured for a consultancy affiliated with the firm, or for a niche offering that the firm would like to market separately from the larger firm.

Each satellite site can have a unique look and its own domain name. Because satellite sites share the same CMS as the firm’s main website, you can instantly repurpose content (e.g., news, events, publications, case studies) with the click of a mouse.