For 50 years, the world’s leading corporations and innovators have entrusted Finnegan with their most valuable assets: Intellectual Property. When the time came for the full-service IP firm to refresh its website, Finnegan entrusted RubyLaw.

Being an intellectual property specialist, Finnegan hires scientists, engineers, and experts with unique skill sets and puts them through law school. This unique model has put the firm at the forefront of its niche and frequently leaves clients asking, “I’m not sure if I’m working with a scientist or a lawyer.”

The model conveys to visitors that Finnegan is in a class of its own, which is why our team and design partner had the challenging task of reflecting the firm’s market position through the new site and delivering an unparalleled experience that equally showcases its depth of knowledge. For its part, the creative team invigorated the brand by providing a clean yet bright visual platform. A series of illustrations offer welcoming backdrops to key pages to add a bit of whimsicality to the density of content on the site. Yet, as remarkable as the design is, the site’s structure and functionality, powered by RubyLaw, a cutting-edge legal technology platform, elevates the content, firm, and ultimately, user experience.

The new website offers a glimpse into RubyLaw’s advanced personalization and content recommendation capabilities, most obvious in the “Your Finnegan” feature of the website. This user-focused feature follows a site visitor throughout the website, observing topics of interest and making intelligent and business development-focused recommendations for firm professionals and content of note. The result is a user experience tailored specifically to a site visitor’s focus and interests, fully supporting the firm’s business development and marketing goals.

Finnegan.com boasts a Tools section, which is a free, comprehensive, and public-facing resource that allows site visitors to explore and review decisions by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. This service provides a benefit to the larger legal community, as well as intellectual property aficionados, while also functioning as a marketing and business development driver. An advanced search function also enables visitors to identify which decisions Finnegan has analyzed and a link to the firm’s Patent App[eals] iOS app. Beyond the current benefits of the Federal Circuit IP Decisions tool, the utility has the potential to expand into other types of tools and content domains. For instance, the firm could choose another IP-related topic and develop a similar internal or external tool.

Among the additional content offerings, the firm has published digital books. These are “gated,” meaning visitors can access them by completing forms and providing information. However, another aspect of business development is baked into the site’s design. Given the massive volume of content curated by Finnegan, including that of multiple blogs, the site serves as a central repository and entry point for all of it. The extensive blogs nest into the site; each is accessible via specific landing pages.

This nesting feature is one advantage of RubyLaw, which also lets visitors seek content on related but external blogs through a single search field. On the topic of search, RubyLaw Smart Search, Level 2, delivers a sophisticated tagging taxonomy that unifies the content, which is then harmonized under an “action center.” Once visitors have found the content they are looking for, a utility navigation feature invites them to create PDFs, emails, and social media shares, and then translate them into multiple languages. Regarding results, the relaunched Finnegan website has realized a reduction in bounce rate of 20%.