Winston & Strawn: RubyLaw-powered website

The new Winston.com offers an innovative user experience worthy of an international firm with more than 160 years of actual experience.

To reach and maintain the level of excellence Winston requires, they selected RubensteinTech to build their site, our RubyLaw Content Management System to power it, and our team of software engineers to support it for the long term.

Our partner, Carbone Smolan Agency began the project with an immersive process designed to translate Winston’s brand promise and functional requirements into a high-end website design that leverages powerful RubyLaw features and the latest web technologies available. RubensteinTech was engaged throughout the design phase to advise and gather requirements for the front-end website and the RubyLaw CMS developed over the subsequent four-month period.

With nearly 1,000 attorney bios, 17 offices, detailed experience pages for practices, industries and regions, innumerable news article content and seven distinct blogs, the site’s architecture, design and search features all work together to empower the user to quickly navigate, find and save the content they need. 

Key features

Responsive web design
Winston.com is optimized to work everywhere users could possibly be. A flexible site design that conforms to every screen and device smoothly transitions from a widescreen display to laptop size, to tablet, and finally mobile devices.  A number of refinements were added to improve touch screen interaction for all mobile devices.

Parallax and Animation Effects
Parallax and animation effects are used judiciously throughout the site to enhance story telling on the homepage and to reinforce the linear transitions as the user scrolls through related content on overlay pages.

Poster Pages and Overlays 
Winston.com engages users with ‘poster pages.’ These pages offer rich summary content across related content areas that links to overlays with more information. The user can quickly swipe through the overlays to delve deeper into a topic without losing the context of their original page selection.

My Binder
With so much content, Winston offers its users a way to save articles, bios, services and more to one place.  These items are easily added to the user’s own ‘binder,’ a single page they can come back to again and again to view the content that’s most important to them.

Sharing and Social Media Integration
Social media network integration is key to legal industry firms and prospects. Users can share every page of the site through Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+ or email. 

Multilingual Support
For international users, selected portions of selected pages are translated into French, German, Spanish, Traditional Chinese, and Russian.

RubyLaw empowers the Winston & Strawn marketing team by offering a level of control and efficiency widely thought impossible for a large law firm. The RubyLaw CMS is the result of combining RubensteinTech’s experience of partnering with Am Law 100 firms for more than five years and over a decade content management industry experience. RubensteinTech understood the drawbacks of Winston’s current technology options, and offered a custom alternative that includes the technical innovation they require to compete online.

Key features that empower the Winston RubyLaw user:

RubyLaw 360
Sophisticated, but easy-to-use, legal industry object relationship mapping makes it easy for RubyLaw administrators to cross-reference content to a cross-section of Winston’s Lawyers, Offices, Practices, Regions, Industries, and Publications. 

Word and PDF Export
RubyLaw users can quickly combine key content pages of Winston.com into a professionally-designed, exported Word document or PDF.

Self-edited Bios
This feature enables Winston lawyers to control their own bio content via secure links, including reports to automatically notify attorneys when their bios have not been updated within a defined time threshold (i.e. 60 days). Alternate bios are also available.

RubyLaw Media Browser
Drag and drop uploading and management of most common media types, including: photos, slideshows, audio files, video, PDFs, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. RubyLaw-managed video in a variety of formats with associated closed-captioning text as well as the capability to embed videos via YouTube and Vimeo.

Image Rendering
Winston can upload one high-resolution image and RubyLaw will do the rest. This is especially important for a responsive website that supports retina devices. An automated process will scale, crop, and sharpen all states of a given image. For Winston.com RubyLaw generates eight versions of each attorney bio picture.

Shared Source Model
By switching to RubyLaw, Winston was able to prevent vendor lock-in and maximize flexibility through RubensteinTech’s shared source code licensing model. RubyLaw clients have a perpetual license, which includes full access to the entire source code of the system, including the back-end database. The complete website and RubyLaw source code is provided to the client along with all of the underlying platform components, which are open source, so that the entire system could be managed by a third-party development firm or in-house technology team without RubensteinTech’s involvement.

The combination of best of breed design and technology has created a truly empowering user experience for both Winston and their users. The resulting RubyLaw-powered Winston.com represents what many consider the new bar for a law firm website, the perfect combination of user-focused design and technology.