Writing a Business Case for Law Firm Web Projects

No matter what size your law firm is, investment in a redesign of your firm’s website is likely to be a significant expense. Agency fees, production expenses, staff time, and opportunity costs all add up to a big number that needs to be properly justified. This is where the business case comes in - the subject of this article.

There is lots of guidance available on how to write a business case. You might even have a standard model that you use in your own firm. Our approach is based on guidance from the Association of Project Management (APM), which we have tailored to the particular needs of law firm website projects.

The purpose of a business case is to decide if a new website is a worthwhile use of your firm’s resources. It aims to prove whether a website meets the needs of your firm better than any other option, outline possible benefits, and explore the risks, costs and time involved. It should then conclude with an investment appraisal that weighs up the expected benefits against the planned cost of achieving them.

The first step is to outline the reasons for considering a new website in the first place.

1. Reasons

This is the section where you outline why your firm needs a new website. Be specific. Your reasons will almost certainly boil down to: attract new clients, get new business from existing ones, or attract top flight staff. However, your project stands a much better chance of success if you can detail the reasons more precisely. An example of a well defined reason for initiating a new web design project for your law firm would be something like this:

“45% of our firms total billings currently comes from real estate matters despite the fact that only 20% of fee-earners sit in the real estate department. Fee-earners aren’t cross referring effectively, and awareness of our expertise in other department, particularly employment and pensions, asset finance and capital markets, is low amongst existing clients.

The real estate department has made good use of the current website to the point where they have almost assumed ownership. We feel this is discouraging other departments from taking part and that a change in design and structure would encourage other departments to make better use of the resource, and would promote cross-selling between departments.”

Each firm will have their own reasons, and it is worth spending time to find out all the reasons behind your own decision. It is helpful to think of reasons in two categories:

Strategic reasons such as:

• Change in positioning?
• New expertise?
• New locations?
• Change in management?
• New brand identity?

Functional or operational reasons such as:

• Problems with existing agency
• Problems with technology or publishing process
• Problems with the way the site is indexed by search engines
• Problems with usability or user experience

2. Options

As the person charged with marketing your law firm, it is your responsibility to achieve the benefits your firm demands in the most cost effective way possible. The purpose of this section is to outline all the possible options available to help you address the reasons given in section 1 and to show that work on your firm’s website is the best option. Of course, if you find through this exercise that it isn’t the best option, you can abort the project without having committed more than a couple of hours thinking time.

Options you could show you’ve considered may include:

• Refresh rather than redesign
• Meet the need offline with activities like events, direct mail, and brochures
• Have partners spend more telephone time with clients
• Build a team and complete the project in house
• Run a training programme to improve marketing effectiveness

Don’t forget that doing nothing is one very cheap option available to you. Your business case should show that you have considered what would happen if you didn’t run the project at all. This is an exercise in prudent management. It should demonstrate that you’ve considered the alternatives and that this really is the best course of action.

3. Benefits

Having explored the reasons and considered your options the next step is to outline the benefits of the chosen solution. Try to included every possible benefit. This will help you to complete a full investment appraisal later in the business case.

Wherever possible, it is a good idea try and quantify the benefits. You might go for something like this:

• Generate 25 new business enquiries per month.
• Attract 150 candidates who meet our training contract requirements.
• Increase the number of press opportunities from 8 to 20 per month.

Of course, not all benefits can be quantified in this way. For less concrete outcomes, provide written descriptions that paint a picture of what the future will look like. 

4. Opportunities and Threats

In many ways, planning is really just guessing, and a business plan for a law firm website is no different. There are many things that may affect the actual outcome of your web design project. Some of these will affect the project for the better, and some may put it at risk. We refer to these as opportunities and threats and it is worth thinking about them now.

Make a list of all the things that might affect the project. Put them in two piles - opportunities in one and threats in the other. For each threat, decide how likely it is, and to what extent it will affect the project. Give highest priority in your planning to those which are most likely and will have the highest impact. Write each threat in your business case and outline the actions you will take to try and avoid or overcome it.

Now do the same thing with opportunities. What things might happen which would open up new opportunities? What would the effect on the project be, and how would you maximise the benefits for your firm? Add these to your business case document.

5. Cost

The whole purpose of the business case is to justify the cost, so it is important to produce an accurate estimate. Include hard costs like agency and production fees, and also make an allowance for staff time. Break the budget down and justify each area of expense to show that the costings are as accurate as possible.

Staff time can be estimated on a pure cost, or an opportunity cost basis. Pure cost accounts for time at the hourly rate it costs the firm to employ each individual. Opportunity cost evaluates time at each person’s charge-out rate. Lawyers are normally accounted for using opportunity cost and support staff at pure cost.

Give consideration also to the on-going costs. Do you need professional help to keep on top of maintaining the site and keeping one step ahead on the search engine optimisation front, for example? Online marketing can be time consuming, so make sure you understand how much monthly input you will need from everyone involved.

6. Timescales

Human are generally very bad at estimating time. To help improve the accuracy of your estimates, break down the work into small tasks and estimate these individually and add them up to reach a total. Once you have the total resource requirement (in man hours) you can look at how to resource the project based on the time, money, and man-power available to you.

Your timescale may be affected by a compelling event; that is an event by which time the project must be complete. If this applies to you then simply work backwards from the deadline and resource the project as required.
You may need external help to make estimates, especially when you are hiring an agency to do the work for you. At Isaac Parker, we estimate timescale on the basis of 3 cycles lasting 4 to 8 weeks for our side of the work. On top of that you need to allow as much time as it will take to collect and deliver feedback to your design agency. You should also allow time to create, proof and edit content which can very quickly eat up an awful lot of time.

Three to six months is a typical end-to-end timescale, although it could take anything up to a year if yours is a very large firm or very complex changes are being considered.

7. Investment Appraisal

The investment appraisal is where you bring all the aspects of the business case together aiming to quantify value for money. You start by putting a value on each benefit. Websites typically have a shelf life of between 3 to 5 years so multiply annual benefits by the same figure. From the total value of benefits, take away the cost of development plus any allowance for annual maintenance.

The resulting figure is your predicted return on investment and should be at least twice the cost of development. If your ROI isn’t that high, then it might be worth reconsidering your figures or questioning the wisdom of starting a new web project at all - your partners would be better off putting their money in the bank for 5 years and taking the interest payments!

8. Evaluation

The evaluation stage of a business case may not form part of the written document. The investment appraisal should have covered that. This is the part where you look at your work with a critical eye. It is helpful to leave a break of a couple of days before coming back to look with fresh eyes. Does this still sound like a wise move?

The final step is presenting the business case to whoever is going to sign the cheque. The ground work you have put in should put you in a strong position that demonstrates why this is the best course of action.