A law firm site that ranks — and a portal that bills

AHS Law is a boutique commercial litigation and corporate advisory firm in Cape Town. They came to us with two problems that turned out to be the same problem. The marketing site, built years earlier on a generic WordPress theme, was ranking nowhere — competitors with half the credentials sat above them on every primary search term. And client document exchange happened via email, with the inevitable 30MB PDFs bouncing off Gmail limits and partners having no audit trail of what had been signed when. The directors did not want a brochure refresh. They wanted measurable inbound and a client experience that matched the standard of work they delivered.

“Clients were finding our competitors before they found us, and the ones who did find us were emailing PDFs back and forth like it was 2009. We needed both fixed.”

Lawyers are sold on trust signals — and trust signals, online, reduce to two things: proof and speed. Proof means real cases, real outcomes, real contributors with names and photos, structured for both humans and Google. Speed means the page renders before the prospect's patience does. Most law firm sites get neither right. They hide their best work behind generic "Our Expertise" pages and ship 4MB hero images. We treated the marketing site as a reputation engine first and a brochure second — and we treated the client portal as a billable feature, not a cost centre.

The marketing site is a Vite + React + TypeScript build with Tailwind v4, statically rendered and served from Vercel's edge. Every practice area has its own deeply structured page with schema.org markup, real case summaries, and named author bios with bar admission dates — the kind of content Google's helpful-content updates reward. The client portal is a separate Firebase Auth + Firestore application: clients log in, see their matters, upload documents to a write-only intake bucket, and receive notifications when their attorney has reviewed something. Documents are versioned, audit-logged, and signable inline via a third-party e-signature integration. Mobile LCP came in at 1.4 seconds on 4G. Within eight weeks of launch the firm was ranking number one organic for its primary practice term in its city, and inbound enquiries had doubled.