A small law firm that explains things plainly

The brief

Park & Hayes is two partners. Catherine Park anchors the estate-planning side — wills, revocable trusts, probate administration under Idaho code, healthcare directives, powers of attorney. Daniel Hayes anchors the small-business side — LLC and S-corp formation, operating agreements, commercial contracts, employment basics, buy-sell agreements. The two practice areas overlap at the edges (estate-side business succession, business-side ownership transitions), which is structurally intentional — it’s the natural rhythm of a small firm where the partners genuinely collaborate.

What they don’t do: litigation of any kind, family law, criminal defense, personal injury. This list mattered more than it might seem at first.

The audience for the site is the kind of small-business owner or family that needs a will or an operating agreement and is calling around for an attorney. They’re not in a crisis; they’re doing the thing they’ve been putting off. The voice that wins this audience isn’t dramatic; it’s the voice of the lawyer their friends recommend because the explanations actually make sense.

The unstated promise behind “Park & Hayes Law” is: we explain things plainly. Everything downstream — copy register, design choices, interactive tools, even the firm’s positioning on what they refuse to take on — flows from that promise.

Decision 1: Lead with the visitor’s question, not the firm’s credentials

The single biggest decision was the voice formula. Most law-firm websites open with the firm — “Welcome to Smith & Associates, a premier full-service law firm serving the Treasure Valley since 1987.” That copy is doing the work of a lobby plaque, not a website. The visitor doesn’t care about the firm yet; they care about the thing they’re trying to figure out.

Park & Hayes opens with the visitor’s decision instead:

Trying to figure out which entity is right for your business — or whether your will still says what you meant it to say?

This is a deliberate formula. The hero on every practice-area page opens the same way:

• Wondering whether to form an LLC or just keep operating as a sole prop?
• Putting off your will because the forms make it feel bigger than it is?
• About to sign a contract and want a second set of eyes?

The formula came out of a competitor sweep across 16 law-firm sites — 8 template-platform sites (Brighter Vision-style), 8 premium boutique sites. Zero of the template sites used this opener. Two of the eight premium sites did, and both read as the warmest in the sample. Rare patterns differentiate; warm patterns convert. The intersection is the design move.

There’s also a guardrail: the plain-language version is load-bearing. “Are you intestate?” technically asks the visitor’s question but in the language of a textbook, not a friend. The whole point evaporates. Save the terminology for inline definitions on the practice pages, where the brand promise — we explain things — actually delivers on itself.

Decision 2: Visual register — dark, photography-driven, sans-only

The visual register is dark warm-charcoal primary surface (#16181D) with a single champagne accent (#C9A24E), Mona Sans variable type weight 200–700, partner photography in corner-bracketed plates with museum-style captions (PLATE 01 · ORIGINAL · Catherine Park & Daniel Hayes), and large display section numerals (02 / 03 / 04 / 05) threaded through long pages. A vertical edge-stamp watermark runs up the left page edge as the signature gesture.

The reference points are boutique-boardroom, not editorial-magazine and not engineering-spec. The intent is premium without performance — a site that signals “we take our work seriously” without staging itself as a stage set.

The decision to feature partner photography (faces, on-camera, in their actual office) was a category-specific call. Most professional-services verticals respond well to face-photography as a trust signal — law firms especially, where 4 of 5 top Google results for “Boise law firm” use partner portraits in their hero. The portrait isn’t decoration; it’s a structural answer to “who am I about to call?”

The character-consistency problem — the same two people appearing coherently across solo portraits and a two-shot hero — was solved via Gemini Pro with reference-image uploads. Solo portraits generated first from text prompts; the two-shot generated from text plus the two solos as reference images. The portraits read as the same Catherine and the same Daniel across the site. Skipping this step is the difference between an AI-image rollout that holds together and one that obviously doesn’t.

What the site doesn’t do: no stock-photo handshake-over-desk, no centered-text-over-blurred-background hero, no serif headlines with italic-on-emphasis as a brand signature (that’s a different portfolio mock’s register entirely). The anti-rules were drafted at decisions-locked time, before design even started.

Decision 3: Honor the bar rules without performing compliance

Idaho Rules of Professional Conduct constrain what lawyers can say on their own marketing. Rule 7.1 forbids false or misleading communications. Rule 7.4 forbids specialist or certified claims unless certified by an ABA-approved body — and Idaho doesn’t certify specialists in most practice areas. Outcome guarantees (“we win your case”) are out across the board.

Most law-firm sites either ignore these rules (a small percentage) or follow them grudgingly with disclaimer fine-print that screams “we asked our compliance person.” Park & Hayes follows the rules without performing compliance — which is just good plain-language writing.

• “We focus on estate planning and small business” — not “we specialize in” or “we are experts in”
• “The first call is free” — clear, factual, not “FREE consultation, NO obligation!”
• The Idaho probate estimator (one of three interactive tools on the site) outputs ranges labeled “approximation only,” with disclosures at three independent layers of the result panel
• No case-result claims appear anywhere — the site doesn’t surface dollar figures from prior matters, even hypothetical ones

The disclosures are designed to not feel like disclosures. The result panel says “Approximation only” as a small-caps eyebrow above the headline, the section lede explains what the tool is and isn’t, and the bottom of the card has an italic note about consulting before relying. Three surfaces, three voices, none of them performing professional caution.

This is bar-rule compliance as a brand asset, not a tax.

Decision 4: The page about what we don’t do

Most law-firm sites either list every conceivable practice area (template sites — “appearing competent in all things, actually competent in nothing”) or quietly omit the gaps (most premium sites — leaving the visitor to call and discover the firm doesn’t handle their matter). Park & Hayes has a third option: a dedicated page about how to find a lawyer for the kinds of matters it explicitly doesn’t take.

The Finding Counsel page covers litigation, family law, criminal defense, and personal injury. For each, the page describes what to look for in counsel, what questions to ask in an initial call, and what kinds of red flags to watch for. It also includes a general “how to vet any lawyer” closing section.

The page reads as helpful older-sibling content. It does not list specific competing firms — Idaho RPC 7.2(c) has surface area around referral arrangements, and a fictional firm naming real competitors creates real-vs-fictional disclosure problems. Criteria-only is safer, cleaner, and still distinctive. Across the 16-site competitor sweep, exactly zero firms had this page. Park & Hayes is 1 of 1.

The strategic effect is small but real: a visitor whose matter is out of scope leaves the site having received value rather than having been refused. That’s a different relationship than “we don’t handle that — try another firm” — and it’s on-brand for the trusted-advisor voice that runs through the rest of the site.

What’s engineered into the site that isn’t visible

Most of the engineering work doesn’t surface to a casual visitor — which is the point. It just makes the site work.

• WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility. Every route and every interactive state (form errors, tool mid-flow, modal open) passes axe-core clean. The site is keyboard-navigable end to end; focus management is wired correctly in modals; visible focus styles meet contrast at the new colors, not just the resting ones.
• Core Web Vitals 90+ on every Lighthouse audit, mobile and desktop. Bundle under 6 MB, LCP under 1.2s, CLS under 0.1, TBT under 200ms, INP under 200ms. Verified across multiple PSI runs (single-shot Lighthouse is noisy).
• Schema.org structured data for Organization, LegalService, and LocalBusiness types — inline JSON-LD at the layout level, indexed by Google for local-SEO surfaces.
• Frontend-only forms. The contact form and tool result-share flow don’t transmit anywhere. For a regulated vertical, this sidesteps every privilege and PII question on day one — no real client data hits the network. The success states explicitly tell visitors what didn’t happen.
• Three interactive tools, hand-verified math. The Estate Document Decision Tree, Business Entity Comparator, and Idaho Probate Estimator each have factor tables that were verified against published source ranges (Idaho Code Title 15, Idaho Supreme Court filing-fee schedules, published Boise-firm cost ranges) before any UI was built. The math layer is its own module; the React component renders the math, not the other way around.
• Real-device verified. Tested end-to-end on iPad and iPhone Safari (which is forgiving in DevTools mobile emulation but unforgiving on the actual hardware) before ship.

These are the kinds of things a template-platform site doesn’t get for any amount of money. They’re also the kinds of things that turn into long-term cost differences — a site that scores 90+ on Core Web Vitals doesn’t need a half-day-a-month performance retainer; an accessibility-clean site doesn’t get a demand letter from a serial-litigator firm; structured data that’s correct from day one ranks faster.

What this case study isn’t

Park & Hayes is a concept project. It was commissioned by no one, designed and shipped by one person to demonstrate what custom-built means in a small-firm legal context. The site is real — every page, every interactive tool, every accessibility test — but the firm isn’t.

What that means for evaluating this case study: it shows the thinking a custom-build engagement gets, on a scope-controlled timeline. A real engagement adds real-client constraints — the partner who insists on the stock-handshake photo, the third practice area added in week two, the existing CMS that needs to integrate, the SEO history that can’t be lost. Those are real and they shift the work. But the design and engineering judgment underneath is the same.

The live site is at parkhayes-law.tylergohr.com. Click through to the practice pages, the tools, the Finding Counsel section. The thinking is in the details.