McManimon, Scotland & Baumann is one of New Jersey's most established public finance law firms, working across real estate, environmental law, redevelopment, litigation and government services. Their attorneys advise on the projects that are transforming the state's landscape, and the firm needed a web presence with the same authority.
I worked on this platform as a full stack developer, and the interesting problems were all about structure.
The challenge
Law firm websites fail in a predictable way: they flatten a deep, interconnected practice into a generic list of services. MS&B's reality is a matrix. The firm has eight major practice groups, and beneath them dozens of sub-specialties that overlap deliberately: affordable housing appears under real estate, environmental and government services, because that is genuinely how the work flows. A client arriving with a redevelopment question needs to find the right practice and the right attorneys regardless of which entry point they choose.
What I built
The information architecture is the core of the project. Practice areas are modeled as a many-to-many graph rather than a tree, so each sub-specialty lives once in the content system but surfaces under every parent group where it belongs. The navigation renders that graph as an explorable mega-menu that lets a visitor scan the firm's full range in seconds, which for a firm selling breadth is the homepage argument itself.
The homepage presents the firm through a numbered narrative, from transforming New Jersey's landscape through constructing innovative solutions to results-driven service, backed by full-bleed imagery of the projects their work makes possible. It reads more like an institution than a brochure, which was exactly the brief.
Beyond the front door, the platform carries the operational surfaces a firm this size needs: the attorney directory with practice affiliations, a projects showcase, the News and Insights publishing stream that keeps the firm visible in its market, recruiting pages and the EI&S section. All of it is manageable by non-technical staff through the content system.
Under the hood
The site is a custom build with a React frontend and Node.js services, structured for the two audiences that matter: humans and search engines. Public finance is a referral and reputation business, so clean semantics, fast loads and precise metadata on every practice page protect the firm's search presence for the terms that bring engagements.
The result
The platform presents a complex, overlapping practice as something navigable and confident. It is a good example of a project where the hard work was invisible: the graph behind the menu, not the menu itself.