Sterne, Kessler, Goldstein & Fox

4th largest intellectual property firm in the USA

For 45+ years, Sterne Kessler has protected innovation across many industries, helping clients protect, transfer, and enforce their intellectual property (IP) rights. The firm provides strategic counsel from idea conception and product development to commercialization, and beyond. Sterne Kessler focuses on providing the full range of IP services, including IP strategy, patent and trademark prosecution, litigation, opinions, and transactional support. The key industries in which the team operates include electronics and high-tech, life sciences, consumer products, automotive, manufacturing, and more. 

The firm’s website is a business-critical instrument used to showcase the firm’s intellectual property expertise, services, and success stories. It enhances the firm’s visibility and credibility while attracting prospects and clients seeking essential information on IP at a glance. The website administration team had an idea to update the site's look and feel and turned to Five Jars to bring their vision of the new web platform to life.

Goals of our future collaboration

From the beginning, we recognized the importance of creating well-structured, informative, and user-centric web pages that would help the audience quickly navigate to the necessary information and action items. Smooth user experience, consistency, and streamlined site administration were at the top of the priorities list.

The content presented on Sterne Kessler’s website was, by nature, detail-heavy and spanned different complex legal fields. Our task was to make the information easily accessible and create a digital presence that would reflect the company’s uniqueness and leadership in the IP sphere.

Discovery and main project phases 

During our discovery phase with the Sterne Kessler team, we performed detailed site and design usability audits and spotted several critical issues. Most notably, the usability of the old website functionality and the lack of consistency in the design strategy. Considering the industry specifics, we focused on making the site look more professional and wanted to introduce more dynamics, space, and uniqueness to the overall look.

Because the client was very eager to finally launch an updated website version in the shortest time frame possible, we decided to break the project into two main phases. The first one was to include all the technical configurations, design optimization, implementation, and the launch itself. In the second phase, we decided to set up smooth content management functionality with Gutenberg integration to simplify the website administration for the in-house team.

More dynamic and professional look

Sterne Kessler's passion for intellectual property and focus on helping innovators protect their IP in the United States and globally inspired us at Five Jars. Our design team worked to simultaneously create a clear, consistent, more vibrant, and flexible design system for the law firm. 

Our scope of work regarding the visual optimizations included the following:

• New designs for the website's main pages, such as Home, Professionals, Resources, and more
• Introducing a system of design components (buttons, blocks, backgrounds) that can be reused throughout the content creation process and ensure consistency
• Improving accessibility, color contrasts, and font sizes on the web pages
• Navigation optimizations, including changes for the website header and footer
• Introducing different media types to the design and adding animation for a more engaging look

Improved user experience

Ensuring a user can easily navigate through a website and intuitively achieve its informational goals is a core aspect we consider in every project. That is why, during the onboarding of Sterne Kessler's project, we addressed fixing the website's current functionality, which was leading to a poor user experience.

For instance, on the Professionals page, one of the website's core pages, the user journey of applying different filters was not remembered by the back end. We improved this functionality and allowed users to share links with filters applied, return to the necessary content, and preserve the applied filters when reloading the page. 

We also improved the visibility of the Search bar and on-page filters and excluded the possibility of leading users to empty pages as it was previously. Our team optimized the sitemap to ensure the content architecture was clear and understandable. All these improvements allowed the Sterne Kessler team to surface more information about their areas of expertise, services, and the knowledge of their in-house professionals.

Taking care of all the tech aspects

The two processes of setting up the new website and design development ran in parallel. While the design team was working on the UX improvements, our engineers did all the configurations on their side. 

The old WordPress-based website was built on outdated legacy technology, Gulp, which created security risks and would cause a lack of scalability in the near future. We migrated the theme to Vite.js and rewrote most scripts to TypeScript and configured a new hosting environment. All the existing plugins were updated to the latest versions, and we ensured the existing styles and components worked seamlessly with the new technology. 

Our tech team also set up and configured additional plugins for seamless site performance, content migration, caching, and multimedia file processing. A separate phase also involved integrating website submission forms with HubSpot for streamlined marketing management. We gave the team an instrument to build different contact forms and synchronize them directly with their customer base in HubSpot for further marketing activities.

Flexibility in cooperation across all steps

One peculiarity of our collaboration with the Sterne Kessler team was that many changes were introduced from the client side as the projects progressed. This was a sign of trust for us, which is held as a very high value in our collaboration, and we did our best to stay flexible and respond to all of these requests.

For instance, during the design optimization phase, we had to extend the initial design scope. All because the client team liked the changes we introduced and wanted to spread them to more website pages and functionality. As a result, what was planned as some slight visual changes and tech launch turned into comprehensive design and UX optimization.

Key results

Our team tested every nook and cranny of the website to ensure everything was working properly. Still, upgrading the tech systems was not the ultimate goal of this project. Our focus was kept on website visitors and the big amounts of complex information they were to navigate through.

By introducing brighter contrasting colors, clear typography, and a dynamic visual style, we created a design that didn’t feel like the standard law firm webpage. Instead, we offered the Sterne Kessler audience a more welcoming and engaging experience. As a result of our close collaboration, not only does the website now function better, but it also looks and feels more professional. It improves the overall customer experience and elevates Sterne Kessler's online presence.

Our collaboration with the Sterne Kessler team continues. Five Jars engineers work on configuring Gutenberg integration for smooth content management and curation, as well as provide maintenance and requested consultations.