Easement Legal: a law firm site without the mahogany

Easement Legal is a fictional-but-plausible community legal centre in western Sydney: fourteen staff solicitors, a volunteer advice night, and a caseload spanning tenancy, family law, fines and employment. Their clients arrive in the worst week of their year, often in a language that isn't English, almost always on a phone. Their old website greeted these people with a stock photo of a gavel, a "practice areas" dropdown full of Latin, and a contact form that promised a reply "within 5–7 business days".

The centre's principal solicitor put it bluntly in the kickoff: "The site looks like we charge. We don't." Here's how we rebuilt it around the people actually arriving, what we made of the dreaded fee question, and the illustrative numbers that followed.

The challenge

Community legal websites share a failure pattern we've also seen in health and government work: they're written to reassure funders and peers, not the person on the phone at the bus stop. Easement's version had three specific fractures:

• Intake was a translation tragedy. 41% of the centre's clients prefer a language other than English — Arabic, Vietnamese, Mandarin and Dari most of all. The old site was English-only with a "for interpreters, call…" footnote.
• Legal categories don't match life categories. "Civil litigation — tenancy division" is how the profession files the problem. The client's filing system is "my landlord is evicting me". The mismatch meant the front desk spent eleven hours a week redirecting people who'd read the site and still called the wrong line.
• Fees radiated anxiety. Community centres are mostly free or low-cost, but the old site said nothing about money anywhere, and silence on price reads as expensive. Reception's most-heard opening line: "I probably can't afford this, but…"

The approach

A service finder written in life-events, not legal taxonomy. The homepage leads with a single question — "What is happening?" — followed by plain-language doors: "I'm being evicted", "I've left a violent relationship", "My employer hasn't paid me", "I can't pay a fine". Each door opens a one-page answer in this order: what this usually means, whether Easement can help, what it costs (usually nothing), and what to do today. The structure echoes the answer-first pattern in our dashboard philosophy: the answer leads, the apparatus follows.

Interpreter-first, not translated-after. We built the four priority languages as first-class editions, not machine translations bolted on: professionally translated, reviewed by community readers, and — crucially — the information architecture itself was adapted, because tenancy stress is framed differently across communities. A persistent, honest interpreter line ("Call us and say your language — we'll bring an interpreter, free") appears on every page, in that page's language. The phone number is tappable and huge.

The fee table, on the homepage. We put money where the anxiety lives. A simple band: Advice — free. Casework — free if you're eligible (here's what that means in 40 words). If you're not eligible, here's what private help typically costs, because surprises are worse than numbers. Publishing the shape of costs, even other people's, was the single most discussed decision of the project — and the most vindicated. It's the same honesty-lever approach as the pricing work in our Larklight rebuild, transplanted to a place where the stakes are eviction, not MRR.

Trust signals that aren't stock gavels. No marble columns. Instead: photos of the actual advice room (warm, a bit scruffy, real), named solicitors with human bios that say what they're good at ("Ruth has handled 400+ tenancy matters and will tell you straight"), and a prominent registration line from the professional regulator. Research keeps showing specificity outperforms symbols — we said the same thing rebuilding Copperline Mutual's voice.

Built for the phone at the bus stop. The site is a static build: sub-second pages on a prepaid Android, works in the train tunnel, total page weight under what the old hero image weighed alone. Accessibility was treated as the baseline rather than the audit — the process is the one we've documented for product teams getting WCAG AA right — and every page passes at a grade-8 reading level, checked with real readers, not just a score.

The outcome

Eight months post-launch:

• "Wrong line" calls to the front desk fell 62% — the equivalent of handing the centre back most of a full-time role, redeployed into casework.
• The four non-English editions now account for 29% of all sessions, and advice-night attendance with an interpreter booked ahead rose measurably — people arrive expecting to be understood.
• The opening line changed. Reception logged the "I probably can't afford this, but…" preface dropping from the majority of calls to under one in five. The fee band did that.
• Saturday-evening traffic tripled. The worst weeks don't keep business hours; a site that answers properly at 9pm on a phone quietly became the front door.
• Two other community legal centres adopted the service-finder content model (the taxonomy and page templates are deliberately shareable), which the centre counts as impact, not competition.

Stack and team

Astro for a static, featherweight build; TypeScript; Sanity so the (tiny) staff team edits every word themselves; Pagefind for instant client-side search in all five languages. Squad: one content lead (me), one designer, one engineer, with the principal solicitor and two front-desk staff in weekly reviews — front-desk staff, note, not just management. The shape of the engagement is the one we describe in how we work.

What we'd tell another legal service

Write your categories from the client's week, not your org chart. Publish the money shape even when the honest answer is "it depends" — especially then. And treat translated editions as products, not features: they deserve their own readers, their own testing, their own care.

More in this spirit across our non-profit work and the journal. If your organisation's website is turning away the people it exists for, we'd like to hear about it.