Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati (“Wilson Sonsini”) has represented the trailblazers and progress-makers of Silicon Valley for more than 50 years.

The firm’s identity is so closely intertwined with innovation and exponential growth that it’s nearly impossible to separate it from the clients it represents. Despite its impressive legacy, the firm’s marketing technology needed to be updated to reflect its pioneering history and future potential.

The firm selected RubyLaw to eliminate the friction of back-end processes, particularly those slowing down marketing and business development activities. RubyLaw, a robust legal technology platform powering websites, automating and generating native proposal documents, and organizing and leveraging experience data to facilitate business engagement. This choice eliminated frustrating legacy processes and brought Wilson Sonsini into a first-mover category—much like the clients it represents.

Supporting RubyLaw’s performance is a super-charged search engine, which delivers faster results for users while weighting results to surface information according to relevance, priority, and geography. RubyLaw API Connector, the platform’s REST-based API, seamlessly integrates with other back-end systems, allowing Wilson Sonsini’s Marketing and Business Development team to have structured data at-the-ready to analyze and incorporate into key decision-making processes. With the RubyLaw Experience and Proposals modules, the firm ensures greater internal alignment and efficiency while freeing timekeepers up to focus more on billable activities—rather than bogging them down with administrative tasks.

This year-long initiative involved cross-practice and intra-team collaboration, guided by RubyLaw’s capable project leadership. Here’s how it all came together.

We initiated the project with a kick-off session to ensure internal alignment and establish a cadence of communication and operating rhythms. Next, we began our thorough discovery process, understanding the existing technology infrastructure, interdependencies, and necessary activities to support an appropriate transition to RubyLaw CMS.

In concert with our design partner, we fabricated a new site map, defining the main navigation, secondary navigation, and utility elements to live on the firm’s new website. Next, we developed wireframes, schematic documents with notes to address functionality and special requests, and key templates describing the details of page elements, data requirements, and RubyLaw-managed content. Templates for Wilson Sonsini consisted of unique pages, those custom-designed to differentiate and express the firm’s authentic character, and best practices pages, those perfected by RubyLaw and deployed to drive efficient implementations and accelerate the development process.

With the front-end design component coming together, our engineers began content migration planning, examining an export of Wilson Sonsini’s legacy website database, and reviewing the content to be ported over to RubyLaw. We also prepared draft documentation for third-party data and systems integration to pair the appropriate back-end systems up with the RubyLaw CMS platform.

Throughout development, our team performed testing and quality assurance. These included Web Standards compliance testing, browser testing to ensure compatibility and functionality on the supported web browsers, integration testing to assure proper data integration, and content quality assurance review.

Approximately four weeks before the Wilson Sonsini website launch, we coordinated with client stakeholders to discuss and implement our proven launch plan. We also scheduled a rigorous training program to prepare the team for daily use of the RubyLaw CMS.

With the new website ready for launch, we conducted final cross-browser testing, systems integration testing, analytics and performance review, comprehensive site scanning for broken links, and testing of SEO redirects mapping content from the legacy website to the new site. In coordination with the Wilson Sonsini team, we launched the new WSGR.com with no public downtime and carefully monitored website traffic and visitor analytics to ensure launch success. 

Once we completed work on the website module on time and within budget, we began Phase 2 of the project—turning on the RubyLaw Experience and Proposals modules to provide Wilson Sonsini with the full capabilities of the RubyLaw CMS. This workstream mostly required field mapping and configuration, having already conducted back-end integration. Thus, it enables the team to seamlessly manage matters and marry the document automation process with custom, branded designs to allow the generation of Microsoft PowerPoint proposals in native format. The product was a robust, cutting-edge marketing technology platform that lets the Marketing and Business Development team work more efficiently and effectively, accelerating related activities by an estimated 5x improvement.

According to Steve Warner, senior marketing manager of business development and one of our key client contacts, “RubyLaw is the fastest, most efficient way to output attorney bios into PowerPoint pitch decks that I’ve experienced in my entire legal marketing career. Our team loves it.”