Dobson Mitchell Allport

A law firm that has operated continuously since 1834 carries a certain weight. The challenge with a website for an organisation like that is doing justice to the history without letting it overshadow what the firm is today: a modern, full-service legal practice working with businesses, governments, and individuals across Tasmania and beyond.

The client

Dobson Mitchell Allport, known as DMA, is one of Tasmania’s oldest and most established law firms. Based in Hobart with a second office in Devonport, the firm covers a broad range of practice areas including commercial law, dispute resolution, family law, estate planning, and migration. They act for private clients, major businesses, government bodies, and not-for-profit organisations.

The challenge

The firm’s previous website no longer reflected where DMA was as an organisation. The design felt dated, and the content management situation made it difficult for the team to keep the site current. For a firm that publishes regular legal articles and needs to maintain up-to-date profiles for a large team of lawyers, that’s a practical problem as much as an aesthetic one.

The brief covered both: a design that matched the firm’s standing and authority, and a backend that gave their staff genuine control over content without needing to call a developer every time something changed.

What we built

A custom WordPress theme built for a large, content-rich site

We built the site on WordPress with a fully custom theme, which gave us complete control over the design without inheriting the constraints of an off-the-shelf template. For a firm of DMA’s profile, the visual presentation needed to feel considered and authoritative. Clean typography, restrained use of colour, and a layout that lets the firm’s depth of expertise come through without cluttering the page.

The site handles a significant amount of content: multiple practice areas, a large team directory, career listings, a summer clerkship programme, and a regularly updated articles and stories section. Getting the information architecture right mattered. A prospective client looking for a family lawyer and a law graduate researching the clerkship programme are arriving with completely different needs, and the navigation needed to serve both without confusion.

Content management that the team can run themselves

A recurring challenge with professional services websites is keeping them current. Staff come and go, articles need publishing, practice area descriptions evolve. If none of that can happen without a developer, it creates a backlog and the site gradually falls out of date.

The WordPress backend was configured to make common content tasks straightforward for DMA’s team. Adding a new staff profile, publishing a legal article, or updating a practice area page are all things their staff can do without technical knowledge. That independence was a core requirement, and it shaped how the content management system was set up throughout the build.

The result

DMA now has a website that reflects the firm’s scale and reputation, and that their team can maintain without external help for day-to-day content. The articles section in particular has become an active part of the site, with the firm publishing regular legal updates across their practice areas, something that would have been friction-heavy on the previous setup.

Working on something similar?

If your professional services website no longer reflects where your organisation is, get in touch and we can talk through what a rebuild might involve.