Transforming an outdated legal website into a credible, user-centered experience that increased page views by 35% and engagement by 31%.
Vaage Law is a San Diego law firm specializing in complex cases including medical malpractice, product liability, serious injury, and civil rights.
In 2020, the firm needed to rethink its digital presence. Its existing website didn't accurately represent its expertise, made important information difficult to find, and wasn't generating the leads the firm expected.
I worked with the team to redesign the experience from the ground up, combining UX strategy, information architecture, visual design, and branding to create a website that better communicated Vaage Law's expertise while making it easier for potential clients and referring attorneys to find the help they needed.
Vaage Law had decades of experience handling complex legal cases, but its digital presence wasn't communicating that expertise.
The existing website used generic imagery, had an outdated visual experience, and made it difficult for visitors to understand the firm's full range of services.
Initial impressions were particularly problematic: some users didn't immediately recognize the website as belonging to a law firm.Analytics reinforced the problem. Traffic and engagement were low, the website wasn't generating the expected leads, and the people visiting the site didn't always align with the firm's target audience.
We needed to do more than modernize the interface.
We needed to rethink how Vaage Law communicated expertise, credibility, and trust online.
Through conversations with potential and past clients, we discovered that the website wasn't providing enough information or direction for several important audiences.
Potential clients struggled to understand Vaage Law's areas of expertise.
Attorneys didn't have a clear path for referring cases.
Aspiring attorneys couldn't easily discover the firm's mentorship opportunities.
These insights helped us recognize that the website couldn't be designed around a single user journey.
It needed to support people seeking legal help, attorneys evaluating the firm's expertise, and members of the legal community looking to connect with Vaage Law.
Research, analytics, and competitive analysis helped us establish three priorities for the redesign:
Improve the user experience
Make important information easier to discover and navigate.
Support growth and lead generation
Create clearer paths for potential clients and referring attorneys to contact the firm.
Build credibility and trust
Create a visual and content experience that accurately reflected the firm's expertise without feeling overly promotional.
These principles became the foundation for both the UX and the new visual direction.
Rather than replacing Vaage Law's existing identity entirely, I evolved it.
The firm wanted to maintain its recognizable blue and gold palette, so I refined the colors to improve contrast and introduced a stronger accent color for important calls to action.
I then expanded the visual system through typography, hierarchy, buttons, and reusable interface patterns.
The goal wasn't simply to make the website look more modern.Every visual decision needed to reinforce the same qualities we wanted users to associate with the firm:
Experienced · Trustworthy · Accessible
The previous website relied heavily on generic imagery that didn't help visitors connect with Vaage Law.
We replaced it with professional photography featuring the firm's actual attorneys and team.
Using authentic photography allowed the website to tell a more credible story and put real people behind the firm's experience and results.
It also gave us a stronger visual foundation for the new brand across key pages.
The previous navigation gave visitors an incomplete picture of Vaage Law's capabilities, making the firm appear primarily focused on personal injury.
I redesigned the information architecture and introduced a mega menu that surfaced the firm's broader range of practice areas.
We also created clearer paths for two important actions:
Refer a case and Schedule a consultation.
This transformed the navigation from a simple list of pages into a tool for helping different audiences quickly identify where they needed to go.
Research showed that people seeking legal help didn't always know which legal category their situation belonged to.
Instead of expecting visitors to understand legal terminology, we created dedicated practice-area experiences around the problems they were trying to solve.
Pages for areas such as brain injury, elder abuse, and vehicle accidents combined educational information with relevant case results and clear ways to contact the firm.
The goal was to make complex legal information easier to navigate while creating a natural path from learning → building trust → getting help.
Credibility was one of the central goals of the redesign.
We created new ways for visitors to see evidence of Vaage Law's experience, including a dedicated case-results experience highlighting successful outcomes across different areas of law.
This allowed the firm's track record to become part of the user journey rather than remaining buried within individual pages.
The redesigned experience also introduced new opportunities for attracting and supporting different audiences.
We created a content experience where Vaage Law could publish information about legal topics and industry developments, helping support organic discovery.
We also created a dedicated mentorship experience reflecting the firm's commitment to supporting the next generation of attorneys.
Together, these experiences expanded the website from a digital brochure into a platform that could support potential clients, referrals, content discovery, and the broader legal community.
Our analysis showed that mobile represented an important part of Vaage Law's website traffic.
The redesigned experience was therefore built responsively from the beginning rather than treating mobile as a secondary version of the desktop website.
Navigation, content hierarchy, calls to action, imagery, and practice-area experiences were adapted to remain clear and accessible across screen sizes.
Following the redesign, Vaage Law saw:
Page Views
Page Engagement
Beyond the numbers, the redesign created a clearer representation of who Vaage Law was and who they served.
The new information architecture made the firm's expertise easier to discover, authentic photography strengthened its credibility, and clearer calls to action created stronger paths toward consultation and referrals.
What began as a website redesign became a broader transformation of how Vaage Law presented its expertise online.
Legal websites have a unique UX challenge: people often arrive during difficult or uncertain moments, and they need to quickly determine whether they are in the right place and whether they can trust the people behind it.
This project reinforced that credibility comes from the entire experience.
Clear navigation, accessible information, authentic photography, thoughtful branding, evidence of expertise, and well-timed calls to action all contributed to building that trust.
By combining user research, analytics, brand strategy, and UX design, we created an experience that not only looked more professional but performed better for both the firm and its audiences.
While at VIIZR, I spearheaded the end-to-end QuickBooks integration journey, from comprehensive research studies to orchestrating the entire design process, all while collaborating closely with the engineering team to bring efficiency to small businesses.
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