Iterative website improvements for leading IP firm

Putting the power back in the hands of Haseltine Lake Kempner

IP experts Haseltine Lake Kempner (HLK) required continuous development of a pre-built WordPress site.

This included delivering and implementing new designs, simplifying functionality, building new features and repurposing existing ones, and streamlining form workflows to speed up internal processes.

What the client wanted

About Haseltine Lake Kempner, one of the largest independent IP firms in Europe providing a full suite of IP services

Working with the organisations and inventors who shape the world around us, Haseltine Lake Kempner is an intellectual property (IP) firm with offices in London, Bristol, Glasgow, Leeds, Munich, the Netherlands and China.

Attorneys at Haseltine Lake Kempner are experts in their fields, including tech, engineering, chemistry and life sciences.

The firm protects the rights of inventors and innovation, files patents and defends them in oppositions, builds portfolios, and represents some of the biggest tech and pharma companies around the globe.

Onboarding an existing WordPress site

Haseltine Lake Kempner approached Atomic Smash when they were seeking out a new digital partner. The team wanted to change the dynamics they were experiencing with their previous agency, wishing for more time and enthusiasm to make continual improvements to their site.

We took on their existing WordPress site and allocated a number of days to work on it each month, with time set aside for design, development and project management.

Our initial aim was to get it robust, reliable and stable, which involved de-bugging the site and cleaning up the code so it could work as the client wanted it to.

Any inherited codebase poses challenges, but we ring-fenced time to understand the site from the beginning and we keep development and design flexible to work around any historic issues.

Putting these foundations in place was our first priority, ensuring the site was functional and user friendly before later moving on to design, purpose, and projects.

Using the website for brand positioning as a modern firm

As a professional services business, Haseltine Lake Kempner is selling a service rather than a product. Instead of working on boosting transactions like with an eCommerce site, we worked closely with the firm to use the WordPress site for greater brand recognition.

We explored how the team at Haseltine Lake Kempner wanted people to see them. Older iterations of the website had felt old-fashioned; to freshen this up, we used new designs and features to project the theme of innovation so that Haseltine Lake Kempner could distinguish itself within the market as a modern firm.

Bringing the Our Teams page to life

Designing the Our Teams page was part of a long-term strategy for improving recognition of the experts across various fields at Haseltine Lake Kempner.

We have all these amazing attorneys in our company but we wanted to associate them with fields other than their main, general fields of expertise. Some have interests in AI and are passionate about that, some have interests in FemTech. An area like FemTech could involve people with main specialisms in engineering, life sciences, chemistry and tech.

Laura Taylor-Jones, Marketing Executive, Haseltine Lake Kempner

Putting a spotlight on specialisms across cross-disciplinary teams – information that was previously floating around the site and hard to find – was the driving force behind freshening this section of the website up.

Our Teams demonstrates that the firm can cater to everyone. We can highlight cross-disciplinary teams and show our clients they can come to us with a tech question, an engineering question, pharmaceutical, anything.

Laura Taylor-Jones, Marketing Executive, Haseltine Lake Kempner

This was not just important for bringing new work in, but also for demonstrating greater breadth of expertise to existing clients, particularly large businesses that have branches across various areas.

We have clients using the Our Teams page and saying they didn’t know we had a team in a specific area, so we’re promoting the expertise we have and the wide range this covers.

Laura Taylor-Jones, Marketing Executive, Haseltine Lake Kempner

Showcasing expertise through the refreshed Knowledge Hub

In addition to topical blogs and articles already produced and distributed on their site, Haseltine Lake Kempner wanted to provide a wider knowledge base to help educate users, for instance giving them the steps to filing a patent or a downloadable PDF explainer.

Accessibility and intuitive user experience were key considerations during our design work for the Knowledge Hub. The client wanted their site to be accessible for everyone to use while delivering a good user experience and engaging site visitors.

It is an accessible hub that is available for anyone, it ranges from basic topics like ‘What is IP?’ to more complex areas like patent prosecution and litigation, and it provides an insight into what we do and if they want more they can come to us.

Laura Taylor-Jones, Marketing Executive, Haseltine Lake Kempner

Previous iterations of the Knowledge Hub limited them to four posts per page and it was tricky to navigate through such a large amount of information.

Instead, they wanted to visually differentiate the Knowledge Hub from the rest of the site and requested the freedom to make every section different, instead of being limited by restrictive templates.

Providing the tools to evolve pages

The team at Haseltine Lake Kempner identified that they’d like to make their web pages more visually engaging, so we produced designs and developed blocks to give them the tools to build out pages themselves that could easily flex with the firm’s needs.

Providing these tools and training (with instructions and demos to give clarity about the purpose of each feature) meant we could give the creative power back to Haseltine Lake Kempner and enable them to build out pages to suit their goals in real time.