Happy Cog designs, builds, and markets for law firms, from global practices to trial boutiques.

04 / One team

You work with the same senior team across all three disciplines.

Curtis has worked with us since 2018. Our design team led its redesign and art-directed the attorney photography. Our developers built the site on Craft (and upgraded it to Craft 5 this year), and our engineers run the AWS environment it sits on. Our SEO and analytics teams have worked on the same property, and we train the firm's marketing staff on the CMS and on Figma when they want to make changes themselves. Nobody new joins the conversation when a question turns from design to infrastructure.

At a law firm, the attorney bio (usually the most visited template on the site) does double duty as a business development page and as the search result for the attorney's own name. Getting it right means solving a design problem and an indexing problem at once. One team that owns both will usually get there faster than two teams trading tickets.

05 / Professional conduct

We write to the rules of professional conduct from the first draft.

Every state regulates lawyer advertising (most by building on ABA Model Rules 7.1 through 7.3), with rules that reach your website, your ads, your directory profiles, and your social posts. Our team writes copy designed to clear your review the first time, with no unverifiable superlatives, no "specialist" or "expert" language unless the attorney holds a certification that permits it, and the disclaimers each state wants around past results. We also build each state's requirements into the launch calendar. New York requires the "Attorney Advertising" label on qualifying communications (a firm's homepage among them) along with a prior-results disclaimer, and Florida and Texas both run formal filing and review for many ads. For multistate firms, we design each template around the strictest jurisdiction its attorneys are admitted in, since one practice page has to satisfy all of them.

Case results and client testimonials still belong on the page, because people choosing a lawyer want evidence that the firm wins. We build the required disclaimer into the case results component itself, where an editor publishing the next verdict can't forget it. On the paid side, Google verifies each attorney's bar license before it will run Local Services Ads under the Google Screened badge, and we manage that verification for you.

Your own website carries legal exposure too. Our analytics team has audited and corrected tag setups for clients who received demand letters under the California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA), which keep arriving at company websites from a small group of plaintiff firms and target chat widgets, session replay, and pixels that fire before a visitor consents. The fix usually meant moving hard-coded scripts into the tag manager and making consent actually control what loads.

We treat accessibility as a compliance question too. ADA website suits are filed by the thousands every year, and law firms make awkward defendants. We've corrected WCAG 2.1 AA issues across a Midwest full-service firm's navigation, and we're building a bankruptcy trust administrator's new site to WCAG 2.2 AA from the start. We've treated accessibility as everyone's job on the team for a long time.

Paid media built around signed cases.

We build legal paid search accounts to keep every dollar pointed at cases the firm will actually take, since a single click on a personal injury or mass tort term can cost well over a hundred dollars. For a personal injury or mass tort practice, our team sets up a separate campaign and budget for each tort, call-only and call-focused ads on mobile, Local Services Ads, geography drawn to where the firm can practice, and invalid-click filtering. On one firm's account, the filter flagged 83% of a new tort campaign's clicks as invalid in its first weeks, and Google credited the spend back.

Larger firms rarely buy client relationships one click at a time. Their paid programs lean toward LinkedIn and programmatic campaigns for partner thought leadership, practice launches, and lateral recruiting, with search reserved for the practices where the firm does take direct inbound matters.

A worked example

When we reviewed a leading personal injury and mass tort firm's Google Ads account this year, it was running 14 campaigns and 39 ad groups, including three dormant medical malpractice campaigns. We rebuilt it as nine campaigns. Each of the seven active mass torts kept its own campaign and budget, since every tort has its own intake criteria, its own case value, and its own window before the docket fills. The four personal injury campaigns became one campaign with ten ad groups, so budget can follow demand across case types. The dormant medical malpractice campaigns became a single campaign with seven ad groups, ready to switch back on. We also moved the account toward exact match, which reduces the chance of an ad appearing against a search for a competing firm by name.

A tort's acquisition window usually opens with a recall, an FDA safety communication, or a published study, then narrows once national firms have signed most of the claimants and the cases are consolidated into multidistrict litigation (MDL). Our team sizes each opportunity before the firm spends on it. One firm's NAION campaign (a form of vision loss linked in litigation to GLP-1 drugs) had roughly 10,000 searches a month nationally behind it, while searches pairing Dupixent with cutaneous T-cell lymphoma ran under 400. Those two numbers call for different budgets, and for different answers to whether search alone can carry a tort or whether it needs paid social behind it.

We also study how the national mass tort firms buy media before recommending a plan. A recent teardown of two of them covered more than a hundred live Facebook and Instagram ads and showed more than half of one firm's social spend going to video, which told our client roughly where the floor for creative investment sits.

Most legal leads arrive as phone calls that many firms never count.

In our experience, most of the conversions a law firm website produces end in a phone call that never shows up in the reports deciding next quarter's budget. Our team tracks those calls through CallRail and the ad platforms' own call tracking, sets a minimum call duration so wrong numbers and solicitations don't count as leads, and carries the click ID through to intake. When the intake team signs a case, that outcome goes back to Google and Microsoft so bidding learns from signed cases. We've written up the method in detail.

Sometimes the problem sits upstream of all of that. One firm's GA4 property couldn't connect paid traffic to outcomes because its click-fraud tool was stripping Google's click identifier from landing page URLs, so every paid visit lost its source the moment it arrived. Our analytics team traced the cause and fixed it, and the attribution came back.

Our analytics team owns the layer underneath: GA4, Google Tag Manager, consent management, and audits of what a firm already has installed (we've run them for Curtis and for other firms). Measuring accurately without third-party cookies is its own discipline now, and we keep a current playbook on it.

Your next client may ask an assistant which lawyer to call.

For consumer practices, that question is often close to literal ("who's the best car accident lawyer near me?"), and assistants assemble the answer from directories, reviews, and the firm's own practice pages. We measure where a firm shows up in those answers. For a leading personal injury and mass tort firm, our SEO team built a set of prompts that mirror how prospects actually ask, and the firm now averages a position of 1.9 in AI answers to "top personal injury attorney" prompts in its home state. Over the same period, its non-branded organic clicks rose 63% year over year, "car accident lawyer" moved from position 67 to 7.5, and a core medical malpractice term moved from 18 to 7.6. Our team got there by rewriting practice pages and blog content so assistants could cite them, restructuring the firm's mass tort pages, and cleaning up its Justia and directory profiles. Our position is that SEO is no longer enough on its own.

Corporate firms face a different version of the same problem. A general counsel who hears your name from a colleague will search the partner, ask an assistant what the firm is known for, and read whatever comes back. We'll tell you plainly when search isn't a meaningful source of new matters for your firm (at many large firms it isn't), and then put the work where it pays off: attorney bios that rank for the attorney's own name, practice and industry pages that answer the questions a GC actually asks, and Insights content structured so assistants can cite it. When a new antitrust boutique's attorneys weren't showing up in searches for their own names, our audit traced the problem to how the bio pages were indexed and how the Insights archive was organized.

Local visibility still matters at every size. For a global Am Law 100 firm, we corrected roughly 300 existing Google Business Profiles and built the rest, close to 900 listings across offices and attorneys, and then set up the process that keeps them current as attorneys join and leave. Monthly organic traffic grew by more than 100% after the listings launched.

The rest of our law firm SEO practice covers what you'd expect and should still ask about: entity consistency across attorney, practice, and office pages, structured data for attorneys and legal services, technical crawlability and Core Web Vitals, and a deliberate policy on which AI crawlers you allow.

Our engineering team plans for the scrutiny a firm's IT team brings, since that team answers to client security audits and outside counsel guidelines. The work covers secure hosting architecture, web application firewall rules, dependency and plugin patching, uptime monitoring, and single sign-on and role-based access for editors. This year we rebuilt the Curtis hosting environment on AWS with load-balanced web servers and a managed database, alongside the move to Craft 5. A Midwest full-service firm gets a written security review from us every quarter, and blocking unverified bots and aggressive SEO crawlers on its site cut bot traffic by 21% and origin bandwidth by 26% over twelve months. Our written reviews state exactly what we checked and where the review's limits were, the way a firm's general counsel would want them written.

We also test launches from inside firm networks, since many firms run SSL inspection proxies that can break a page nobody outside the building sees broken.

Modernizing a site the previous vendor left behind, without a full rewrite, is a specialty of ours.

13 / Recruiting

Recruiting is its own audience with its own pages.

Law students, laterals, and staff read a firm's site differently from clients, comparing it against every other firm on their list. This year our team redesigned a Midwest full-service firm's careers section (seven pages on two new templates, commissioned by the firm's legal recruiting team) and launched it alongside a new navigation and rebuilt Insights and News archives. Recruiting was one of the audiences we designed for at Weil, Gotshal & Manges, where the site puts the firm's people and culture up front.

On the paid side, LinkedIn is usually where lateral recruiting budgets belong, with campaigns targeted by practice, seniority, and current firm.