Legal500
Legal500 is a renowned global legal directory that provides comprehensive, independent rankings and insights into the capabilities of law firms and legal professionals worldwide. Legal500 evaluates firms based on a combination of research, client feedback, and interviews with leading lawyers. The directory covers a wide array of practice areas, offering detailed profiles and assessments that help clients make informed decisions when selecting legal counsel.
Technology:
Elastic search, Wordpress
Service:
Web Application, Website Development
Challenge
With its extensive database of legal firms, it has become a one-stop-shop for businesses seeking legal services. However, with a large and complex data, coupled with years of technical debt plus a poor built in search capability to begin with, end users had a very slow, broken and frustrating search experience on their content platform.The client did have a managed Elastic Search service implemented on the site but that came with its own issues around performance, lack of control and flexibility despite the high cost of licensing.
The website was built on a WordPress multi site architecture, which while beneficial introduced complexity in managing site-wide updates, plugin compatibility, and maintaining consistent performance across all sites. Ensuring that each site within the network functioned optimally without affecting the others required meticulous coordination and technical expertise.
The objectives were to:
- Improve the user search experience by reducing response time and making it more intuitive
- Implement filters and aggregate filters to make search results more refined
- Clean up the database and remove or merge duplicates
- Ensure on time and accurate publication of sponsored listings and content within search results
- Provide ongoing website maintenance and UI fixes on the WordPress multi sites to enhance the user experience
Solution
We implemented a self-hosted, self-managed instance of Elastic Search and performed a data migration to integrate the new instance with the content platform. We designed and implemented new features on the frontend content platform to deliver a more intuitive and refined search experience to end users. Additionally, we wrote and executed a one-time script to ensure data integrity and eliminate duplication. Furthermore, we addressed various UI and UX issues across the multisite network, enhancing the user interface and ensuring a consistent and high-quality experience on all sites.
Results
- Improved customer satisfaction due to accurate and timely updates to sponsored content and listings within search
- The implementation of ElasticSearch and the database cleanup resulted in a faster and more responsive search
experience for users. - The addition of filters and aggregate filters made it easier for users to find the right listings and content for their needs.
- Ongoing website maintenance and UI fixes ensured that the user experience remained seamless and improved
continuously, helping Legal500 maintain its position as a leading law firm.
