Horwood Marcus & Berk Attorney Bios
Overview: Horwood Marcus & Berk Chartered, a Chicago law firm, needed to make attorney bio pages on their website more friendly to potential clients as part of a larger redesign. I served as the copywriter on the project.
Research: We didn’t have access to HMB’s clients or prospects for interviews, so we focused on understanding how HMB gained new clients through the website. By conducting interviews with both HMB’s marketing team and key partners, we learned:
Attorney bio pages draw higher traffic on average than anywhere else on the website
According to current clients, individual attorney bios were a key driver in their decision to hire the firm
Potential clients look to understand what distinguishes individual attorneys, their practice area, what they’ve accomplished for current clients as well as what they can bring to the table in a long-term partnership
Analysis: The voice used on HMB’s site felt stiff, showing little of the attorneys’ individual personalities, experiences, and interests. Bio pages read more like formalized CVs, making it hard for potential clients to determine an attorney’s personality and fit for their needs. The individual attorneys, in short, needed their bios to do a better job of selling them as people, rather than as lists of associations and practices.
An example set of responses from the survey we shared with HMB’s attorneys.
Process: From these interviews and the proposed UI for the new bio pages, we were able to create a standardized template and survey that would allow us to create bios that more accurately reflect the attorneys’ personalities and important experiences, using language that felt more colloquial and less academic.
We shared a short survey with each attorney, which allowed them to call out the “must-haves” for their bio, including practice areas, why clients seek them out, and how they think about their practice. We also asked them to define their professional careers in a quote—a difficult task, but one that gave us a real quote for each bio.
From there, I developed copy that more accurately shows who each person is as a professional, highlights their critical experiences and differentiators, and cuts everything else.
Result: The marketing client told us that almost all of the attorneys approved their new bios without edits. The new site launched in the first week of June and the firm’s attorneys have begun to share the new bios out to their existing prospects.
BEFORE: An attorney bio page before our rewrite and redesign—notice the bullet points listing every accomplishment.
AFTER: The same attorney’s page, after our rewrite and redesign. It’s a clean, simplified, friendly look with straightforward copy that covers the essentials.
While it would have been nice to have access to existing clients and prospects, as well as site data, we were able to distill copy improvements out of secondhand user research to create a cleaner, friendlier site experience. Take a look at the new bios here: https://www.hmblaw.com/professionals