Finnegan: RubyLaw-powered website

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

Being an intellectual property specialist, Finnegan hires scientists, engineers, and experts with unique skill sets, and then 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.”

Conveying to visitors that Finnegan is in a class of its own is why our team, as well as our design partners at Carbone Smolan Agency (CSA), 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, CSA invigorated the brand by providing a clean yet bright visual platform. To add a bit of whimsicality to the density of content on the site, a series of illustrations offer welcoming backdrops to key pages. Yet, for as remarkable as is the design, it is the site’s structure and functionality, powered by RubyLaw, that elevates the content, the firm, and ultimately the 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 end result: a user experience tailored specifically to a site visitor’s focus and interests, in full support of the firm’s business development and marketing goals.

Finnegan.com boasts a Tools section, 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. There is also an advanced search function that enables visitors to identify which decisions Finnegan has analyzed, as well as 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. Again, another aspect of business development 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, and 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 II delivers a sophisticated tagging taxonomy that unifies all of 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, social media shares, and translate into multiple languages.

As for results, the relaunched Finnegan website has realized a reduction in bounce rate of 20%.