Launching the new A&O Shearman brand with an industry leading website

The brief from the client was clear – they didn’t want a law firm website that looked like a law firm website.

Formed from the merger of two of the already large global law firms, Allen & Overy and Sterling & Shearman, the new brand of A&O Shearman was entering the legal landscape as one of the top five law firms globally. They didn’t want this entry to go unnoticed and made sure their new brand and the accompanying website would position them as leaders and not followers.

I worked with Hugo & Cat to implement this new brand across a full website redesign that needed to account for existing content migrated from two completely different existing websites. My role as Associate Design Director was to feed into the in-progress brand guidelines from a digital point of view, design page templates and sign them off with the client, and oversee the creation of the design system.

Homepage mobile designs

Screens showing the the A&O Shearman homepage design as the user scrolls down the page

Exceptional visual design was essential in meeting the brief

Simply following trends or best practice wasn't enough to ensure the work made A&O Shearman stand out as leaders. We drew inspiration from unexpected places such as fashion editorial to create designs that championed the brand.

Carefully crafted layouts were created that combined large typography, bold imagery and dynamic motion.

Motion and interaction brought the minimalist layouts to life.

With the brand focussing on minimalist designs where elements were removed or pared back as much as possible motion allowed us to add the final extra layer to layouts and interactions to ensure they made for a prestigious and considered experience.

I produced high fidelity prototypes to aid in tested the unconventional designs with users and communicate them accurately to the client and development teams.

The lawyer profile page is a key step in the user journey with many technical challenges.

The lawyer profile page was the template that held the contact and biography information for each of A&O Shearman’s almost 4000 partners, associates, researchers and other key staff. It was a key part of their lead generation funnel and also a fairly contentious page amongst stakeholders.

We found from research that user’s first off wanted assurance that the lawyer they were viewing had expertise in their industry and following that examples of relevant past work. To accommodate this we truncated biography and pulled their expertise and industries into a section that also served as links down to those detail pages. We also wanted to reduce friction in getting to the next step so we created a ‘digital business card’ with the key contact info that was fixed in place as the user scrolled.