Website redesign for a London law firm: The French Law Practice on Ghost CMS

Client

The French Law Practice — a boutique law firm based in London, founded in 2009 by Caroline Cohen, a UK solicitor and French-qualified avocat. The firm advises private clients on cross-border French/UK tax and estate planning.

Industry

Legal and professional services — a regulated practice serving private clients

Services provided

• Website redesign and content migration off a bespoke static site
• Managed Ghost CMS hosting
• Information architecture for a regulated professional practice
• A publications section the firm updates itself
• Regulatory pages and SRA badge integration
• Client training and ongoing support

Project objective

The firm had a website. That was never the problem. The problem was that nobody at the firm could change it.

The previous site was a bespoke build — hand-coded pages with the content baked in. Every correction, every new practice area, every legal update meant finding a developer, briefing them, waiting, and paying. So in practice, nothing got updated. A firm whose entire value rests on being current on French and UK tax law had a website frozen in time.

Three objectives were set:

1. Refresh the site, without losing the firm's fifteen years of positioning or its existing search visibility.
2. Make Caroline Cohen self-sufficient. She had to be able to publish a legal briefing the week a tax rule changes, not the quarter after.
3. Meet the obligations of a regulated practice — the mandatory pages, the SRA badge, a complaints procedure that is genuinely findable.

The challenge

• Migrating content out of a bespoke site with no CMS and no export — there is no import script for this, it is done page by page
• Preserving the URLs that already carried links and rankings, so a redesign doesn't turn into a traffic reset
• Structuring a practice that sells expertise, not products: expertise, practice areas, people, publications
• Giving a solicitor an editor she'll actually open on a Tuesday evening between two client files

Solutions implemented

Managed Ghost CMS instead of a bespoke build

Ghost replaced the hand-coded site. The distinction that matters here isn't technical elegance — it's who holds the keys. With a bespoke site, content lives in the code, so content changes require a developer. With Ghost, content lives in a database behind an editor, and the firm owns it.

We host the instance, the backups, the SSL certificate and the domain. Caroline Cohen owns the content and can leave with it.

An architecture that matches how a practice is actually assessed

A prospective private client evaluating a cross-border tax adviser asks four questions, in this order: What do you know? What do you handle? Who will I be dealing with? Can you prove it?

The site answers them in that order:

• Our Expertise — the firm's specialism, stated plainly: transfers of tax residence between France and the UK, cross-border estates, French forced heirship, the tax treatment of French assets held through offshore trusts.
• Our Practice Areas — the concrete matters the firm takes on, including a dedicated French conveyancing department.
• Our People — the partners, because in a boutique firm the client is buying a named person, not a brand.
• Publications — the proof.

Publications: the section that does the SEO work

This is where a professional-services site earns its traffic. A law firm homepage competes with every other law firm homepage. An article titled "How to make a valid French Will?" competes with the actual question a worried client types into Google at eleven at night.

The firm now has a publications section covering French wills versus UK wills, Brussels IV and the EU Succession Regulation, French capital gains tax, purchasing French property, reporting obligations for foreign trustees in France, and the end of the non-dom regime in favour of the FIG regime.

Every one of those is written and published by Caroline Cohen herself. That is the whole point: the person with the expertise is the person pressing publish, with no intermediary flattening the substance.

Compliance, treated as part of the design

A regulated practice has obligations a generic website template ignores. In place: the SRA digital badge, independently verifiable, linked to the firm's regulatory record; a complaints procedure as its own findable page, not a paragraph buried in the footer; a legal notice and a privacy policy. Site-wide search and a light/dark theme round out the reading experience.

Thinking about refreshing a site you can no longer update? Book a free 30-minute video call — no commitment, and we'll tell you straight whether a redesign is worth it in your case.

A step-by-step approach

1️⃣ Content inventory — every page of the old site listed, with its URL, so nothing is silently dropped.

2️⃣ Rebuild in Ghost — pages recreated as editable content, with the four-section architecture above.

3️⃣ URL preservation and redirects — the paths that carried links kept, the rest redirected rather than left to 404.

4️⃣ Visual refresh and compliance pages — branding, theme, SRA badge, complaints procedure, legal notice, privacy policy.

5️⃣ Training and handover — a working session on the editor, then go-live on the firm's domain.

Who this applies to

The pattern generalises well beyond law. A solicitor, an accountant, a tax adviser, a financial adviser, a notary or a small professional partnership all share the same situation: expertise that changes with the law, a site that doesn't, and a budget that doesn't stretch to a developer on retainer.

If your website is technically fine but you haven't touched it in two years because you can't, the problem isn't the design. It's that the content isn't yours to edit. That is what a redesign should fix first.

What the client runs herself

Caroline Cohen publishes her legal briefings directly from the Ghost editor. She writes, adds an image, and publishes. Her practice areas and her expertise page are editable in the same place, with no ticket to raise and no invoice to approve.

We handle the hosting, the updates, the backups and the support. She handles the law.

Conclusion

A website redesign is usually sold as a visual exercise. For a professional practice it is mostly a question of ownership: whoever can edit the content controls how current the firm looks.

The French Law Practice moved from a bespoke site that only a developer could touch to a managed Ghost instance the founding solicitor updates herself — with its regulatory obligations built in rather than bolted on, and its expertise finally visible to the people searching for it.

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