How Cubicle Fugitive Uses Sitefinity CMS to Meet Modern Law Firm Demands
Industries:
Professional ServicesProducts:
SitefinityChallenge
- Managing highly interconnected legal content across lawyer biographies, practice areas, publications, representative matters and industry expertise
- Meeting security, governance, accessibility and compliance requirements demanded by legal IT and risk teams
- Giving marketing teams the ability to update and publish content efficiently while maintaining consistency and control
Solution
- Implemented Progress Sitefinity to provide enterprise-grade security, governance and role-based permissions on a trusted .NET foundation
- Built structured, legal-specific content relationships that automatically connect lawyers, expertise, publications, awards and representative matters
- Enabled marketing teams to independently manage content through intuitive publishing tools, workflows and approval processes while supporting long-term maintainability
Result
- Modernized Aird & Berlis's long-standing Sitefinity website using a hybrid headless architecture while preserving familiar publishing workflows
- Increased content discoverability with more than 1,000 additional pages indexed by Google and a 33% increase in indexed pages
- Improved website performance with a 329% increase in daily crawl requests and a 49.6% reduction in average server response time, while enabling ongoing content management without developer support
Full Story
Challenge
Managing Complex Legal Content
For law firms, a website is more than a marketing asset. It is a repository of expertise that connects lawyer biographies, practice areas, industries, representative matters, publications, events, locations, and thought leadership. As firms grow, merge, and expand their services, both the volume of content and the complexity of those relationships increase.
A lawyer's biography may need to surface relevant publications, representative matters, awards, and areas of expertise. A practice page should display the right lawyers, recent insights, and client experience. Marketing teams must keep that information current and ensure that one update appears consistently wherever the related content is used. What begins as a website challenge quickly becomes a content management challenge.
Balancing Flexibility with Governance
Law firms also operate in an environment where governance and risk must be addressed from the start. Their platforms need approval workflows, role-based permissions, revision history, accessibility support, privacy controls, and a security posture that can withstand detailed review. Marketing teams need to publish efficiently, while the firm needs confidence that the right controls are in place. As Cubicle Fugitive Co-Founder Morgan MacLeod notes, "IT and risk are at the table from the start, not the end."
Cubicle Fugitive has seen these pressures across clients ranging from boutique practices to large, international firms. Those clients need a platform that can organize complex expertise, meet governance requirements, and remain manageable over the long term. Choosing the right content management system is therefore as important as the website's design.
When a firm's IT or risk team sends a security questionnaire, we can answer it honestly because the platform is built to support it.
Morgan MacLeod
Co-Founder at Cubicle Fugitive
Solution
For Cubicle Fugitive, selecting a content management system means balancing technical requirements with the day-to-day needs of the people who will use it. The agency evaluates platforms against three priorities: security and governance, ease of administration, and long-term maintainability.
"Sitefinity brings together the three requirements that matter most to our legal clients: security, ease of administration, and longevity," says Morgan MacLeod, Co-Founder of Cubicle Fugitive. "It is built on .NET, which our clients' IT departments trust, and it supports granular, role-based permissions and enterprise security controls."
Built for Enterprise Governance
Security and governance are often the first considerations in a law firm website project. IT and risk teams may require security reviews, access controls, approval workflows, revision history, and a technology foundation they can support. Built on .NET, Sitefinity provides these governance capabilities while reducing dependence on third-party plugins and workarounds.As MacLeod explains, "When a firm's IT or risk team sends a security questionnaire, we can answer it honestly because the platform is built to support it."
Empowering Marketing Teams
Legal marketing teams manage a steady flow of updates to lawyer biographies, representative matters, publications, events, and career information. Sitefinity's content architecture allows Cubicle Fugitive to build structured, legal-specific content types and connect them so that one update can appear wherever it is relevant. Marketing users can manage content and pages directly while working within the firm's established permissions and approval processes."When a marketing leader asks whether their team can run the site themselves, the answer is genuinely yes," says MacLeod.
Supporting Long-Term Maintainability
Law firms view their digital platforms as long-term investments. Sitefinity provides a supported upgrade path and a stable core that can evolve without forcing a firm to replatform whenever its website or content needs change. Reducing reliance on a large collection of third-party plugins also makes maintenance and security reviews more manageable."It is the difference between upgrades being routine and being a crisis," says MacLeod.
These capabilities let Cubicle Fugitive focus on the work that distinguishes each firm: organizing its expertise, expressing its brand, and creating a digital experience that remains useful and manageable after launch.
Result
Modernizing a Longstanding Sitefinity Website
Aird & Berlis LLP, a leading Canadian law firm with offices in Toronto and Vancouver, has used Sitefinity for over a decade. After substantial growth, its website no longer reflected the firm's breadth, and fragmented content made it difficult to connect lawyer biographies, expertise, representative matters, publications, and news.
Cubicle Fugitive recommended a hybrid headless rebuild. Aird & Berlis retained Sitefinity's familiar publishing tools and workflows, while the website's presentation layer moved to the ASP.NET Core renderer. Cubicle Fugitive also created structured relationships among people, expertise, insights, awards, and representative matters, as well as advanced search and a dedicated student site.
Measurable Gains After Launch
Post-launch data showed clear gains in performance and discoverability. Google indexed over 1,000 additional pages and saw a 33% increase almost immediately. Average daily crawl requests rose by 329%, and average server response time decreased by 49.6%. The website’s core vitals have also shown significant improvement with the move to Core renderer.
The marketing team can also still manage routine content updates, feature timely expertise, and maintain a growing library of biographies and publications without waiting for development support.
The Aird & Berlis project shows how a long-standing Sitefinity implementation can be modernized without discarding the firm's content foundation or familiar publishing environment.
Next Steps
Unlocking Firm Knowledge with AI
Cubicle Fugitive sees governed AI search as a practical next step for law firms with extensive libraries of biographies, publications, insights, representative matters, and client resources. Visitors often know the question they need answered but may not know where that answer sits within a large website.
For MacLeod, the opportunity is to help firms provide direct, reliable answers while maintaining the governance standards the legal industry requires. Progress Agentic RAG is designed to deliver answers grounded in an organization's content and existing Sitefinity workflows. For legal organizations, it offers a potential path to better content discovery while keeping approved information and governance controls at the center of the experience.
As firms explore AI-enabled experiences, Cubicle Fugitive expects to help clients strengthen their content foundations, identify focused use cases, and introduce governed retrieval where it solves a clear need.
About Cubicle Fugitive
Cubicle Fugitive is a brand, marketing, and digital agency founded in 2003. Its senior team specializes in professional services, with law firms as a primary focus. The agency keeps strategy, design, and development in-house, so the people shaping a firm's digital direction stay close to the work through launch.
Sitefinity lets us say yes with confidence to the requirements that shape an enterprise web project.
Morgan MacLeod
Co-Founder at Cubicle Fugitive
