Oblon and Lewis Rice garner top spots at the 2016 Your Honor Awards

Websites designed and developed by Great Jakes took the top two spots in the "Total Website Refresh/Overhaul/Rebrand" category at the Legal Marketing Association's Your Honor Awards for 2016. First Prize went to the Oblon website, and Second Prize to the Lewis Rice website.

This marks the fourth straight year that Great Jakes has been recognized by the Your Honor Awards in the website category. This is also the second year in a row in which the agency has received the coveted First Prize.

More on the Your Honor Awards

The Your Honor Awards is the longest-running annual national award program for recognizing excellence in legal marketing. Oblon and Lewis Rice received their prestigious awards during a ceremony at the 2016 Legal Marketing Association’s annual conference, held this year in Austin, TX.

More on Oblon.com

Oblon, one of the largest full-service intellectual property law firms in the US, enlisted Great Jakes to create a cutting-edge website intended to appeal to the firm’s target market: tech-savvy employees at the world’s leading innovation-driven companies.

Key characteristics of the website include:

  • Homepage Videographic – The website’s homepage features a striking, full-page “videographic.” This technique is an innovative alternative to traditional still photography. The videographic features a series of action-packed clips that illustrate the breadth of technologies that the firm regularly handles.
  • Expansive Page Format – The website achieves maximum visual impact by automatically expanding to fill the screen of extra-wide monitors (up to 1920 pixels wide). This is unlike most websites, which use a lowest-common-denominator approach (1024 or 1200 pixels wide). Because most of today’s high-end laptops come with 1920-pixel displays, a wider format was deemed necessary to appeal to the firm’s target market.

More on LewisRice.com

Lewis Rice, a regional powerhouse law firm headquartered in St. Louis, sought Great Jakes to design and develop a website that would position the firm as a regional juggernaut that is on par with elite national firms.

Unique features of the website include:

  • Client Profiles – This series of extensive case studies is a major highlight on the website. The client stories illustrate the caliber of client that the firm regularly serves, and they describe the close, collaborative relationships that the firm has developed with each of them.
  • Edge-to-Edge Photography – The website uses large, engaging photos of its attorneys in order to make a connection with potential clients located far away—some of whom the firm might never meet face-to-face. For added impact, photos were taken at client locations and local points of interest.

About the Technology

Both the Oblon and the Lewis Rice websites feature "attorney microsites"—a unique approach to lawyer bios that Great Jakes pioneered. Attorney microsites are, essentially, small websites for each attorney that fit within the firm’s larger website. Each microsite can be customized to the specific business development needs of each attorney and can contain any number of pages or type of content. In addition to supporting the attorney bios, microsite functionality has been implemented for the Practice Areas and Industries sections of each website.

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