RubyLaw has a long-standing relationship with Winston & Strawn (“Winston”), an international, RubyLaw has a longstanding relationship with Winston & Strawn (“Winston”), an international Am Law-ranked firm with more than 160 years of experience. Over a decade ago, the firm initially selected the RubyLaw legal technology platform to power its website.

That project began with an immersion process to translate Winston’s brand promise and functional requirements into a high-end website. Our team engaged throughout the project to advise on how the RubyLaw CMS would bring the newly-designed brand to life. 

At the time, the Winston team was managing more than 1,000 attorney bios, 17 offices, nearly 20 blogs, almost a dozen podcasts, and detailed experience pages for practices, industries, and regions across six languages. Thus, a robust CMS was required to support the site’s extensive body of content and information architecture while also giving front- and back-end users the ability to quickly navigate and find the content they needed.

Combining our best-of-breed technology with breakthrough design, we delivered a truly unique experience for Winston and its users, resulting in an award-winning website and recognition in 2014 as the first fully responsive website in the sector.

For nearly 10 years, the Winston team relied on RubyLaw before embarking on a design refresh. The process focused on bringing the evolved Winston to life digitally to reflect the firm’s identity in a more authentic and modern manner with a revitalized, user-friendly website. At the same time, the Winston team sought to overcome user pain points by upgrading to the current version of RubyLaw and establishing tight integrations with additional back-end systems. 

Collaborating with our design partner, we supported the design refresh, migrated critical legacy content, and configured the Winston instance of RubyLaw to meet current and future requirements. We also conducted comprehensive quality assurance testing, leading to the successful relaunch of Winston.com. 

Today, the RubyLaw-powered Winston includes the RubyLaw Documents portal, giving internal stakeholders a way to quickly grab, bundle, and output Winston-branded content in Microsoft Word format across seven different languages in multiple document-size formats. Exported Word documents can also be merged into a single binder or generated individually to cover different use cases and pitch scenarios. Users can access the portal via the front-end website, enabling stakeholders across business units to easily spin up pitch materials without needing to funnel requests through marketing or business development teams or individual members. 

Via RubyLaw API Connector, our REST-based API, Winston’s business units can utilize extensive virtual documentation and usage logs for self-service integration to link data and content between external systems and RubyLaw, directly resolving one of the firm’s key pain points. 

While upgrading to the latest version of RubyLaw provided the firm with greater flexibility, we further enhanced this by adding the RubyLaw Super Template, a modular page type that gives RubyLaw users the ability to display a wide range of content in an open-ended format. Specifically, this enabled the Winston team to create dynamic page presentations, making the front-end visitor experience unique, fresh, and engaging while providing back-end parameters to ensure the integrity of the brand and visual system.

Winston.com also includes the RubyLaw Content Recommendation Engine, which leverages Artificial Intelligence (AI) to drive engagement by suggesting relevant content based on the user’s browser session. Finally, the implementation includes rich suite capabilities through which to manage multilingual content, a critical part of the go-to-market strategy for an international law firm like Winston. 

Above all, the technology driving the Winston website will remain relevant for years and will continue to support the firm — even through any future design refresh initiatives.