Corporate website for a U.S. law firm
Emergency website stabilization and delivery completed within 24 working days, reducing critical pre-launch defects by 85%.
About the Project
A rescue-and-completion engagement for a partially built corporate website after the original launch failed when the previous contractor disappeared. The site integrated Directus as the content core with a Node.js application layer for business logic. The work had three priorities, in order: regain control of the codebase quickly, separate completed features from broken or incomplete ones, and bring the system to a state safe for production. The critical scenarios covered content management, user handling, and custom backend data workflows.
About Customer
McCown & Evans LLP is a boutique San Francisco law firm founded by Kelly McCown and Jeptha Evans. Both partners bring decades of legal practice, strong professional profiles, and high reputational stakes — the website needed to reflect that without compromise. They came to us after the previous contractor went silent, leaving the project at roughly 70% completion with no documentation handoff. The site still had a hard launch date, and the deadline remained fixed.
Abandoned project, no handoff
The previous contractor left the project after delivering ~70% of the scope. We had to reconstruct the architecture, implementation decisions, and the actual status of every existing feature from the codebase alone — no spec, no working notes, no context.
Hard launch deadline
Even after the prior failure, the deadline didn't change. Completion had to be fast, or the client would keep losing time and money on a stalled asset.
Limited internal resources
The client's team didn't have the technical bench to audit the existing work or finish the critical parts on their own.
Directus expertise required
Finalizing the data structure, permissions, workflows, and day-to-day content management in Directus needed hands-on familiarity with the platform — exactly the gap the previous contractor had left open.
Production-readiness gaps
After the initial development phase, the system still had latent issues that would surface in production as slowness, broken states, or unreliable user flows.
Proposed Solution
We started with a technical audit to separate what actually worked from what only looked finished, identify the real launch blockers, and define a structured completion plan with explicit readiness criteria — so the same failure pattern wouldn't repeat under a new vendor.
Project audit
We reviewed both the codebase and the current Directus configuration to identify missing or half-finished functionality and isolate the factors most directly delaying release. The audit produced a prioritized completion plan centered on the critical launch scenarios.
Backend completion
To bring the backend to production-ready state, we finalized the data structure and Directus configuration so content and key entities could be managed properly through the admin layer — not patched around it.
Users and permissions
We completed the user logic and access controls so the client could manage roles and day-to-day workflows inside the system, with explicit boundaries between admin, editor, and view-only roles. This reduces the risk of operational mistakes and content chaos at the firm.
Custom data workflows
Where built-in Directus mechanics couldn't cover the requirement, we implemented custom data workflows to encode the firm's content and entity processes in a controlled, maintainable way — instead of leaving them as ad-hoc admin actions.
Controlled completion cadence
We organized the completion phase as short, controlled cycles with explicit priorities, acceptance criteria, regular check-ins, and documented outcomes. This ensured predictable delivery — keeping the pace steady without last-minute scope explosions on the finish line.
Performance optimization
We aligned system speed and interaction behavior, cleaning up the parts that still looked fragile, unfinished, or unstable, and bringing the key screens and user flows to a state actually fit for production traffic.
Lead capture and form integrity
We designed a hardened contact-form pipeline (form → CRM → email notification to the firm's intake) with anti-spam protection — critical for a legal site where bot submissions and adversarial inputs are routine.
We started with a short alignment focused on two things: what the client actually needed at launch and what the real time constraints looked like. We defined the readiness criteria and the boundaries of the first release so the team wasn't trying to finalize everything at once. That kept the focus on getting the launch across the line, not on rebuilding scope from scratch.
+2 Resource
Results
A project stuck at "70% complete" was released to production in 24 working days, with critical defect counts and operational dependencies reduced significantly.
Released in 24 working days
after the prior contractor's disappearance
−85%
critical defects before launch
−50–60%
content-team requests to developers
3–4× faster
content updates
−36%
site response time after our intervention
+10–15%
form submissions in the first 4 weeks post-launch
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