Alta Via: corporate website for a law firm with 11 practice areas

Context: what came before

Alta Via is not a law firm in the narrow sense. Lawyers, financial specialists, accountants, HR professionals and workplace-safety experts work on each client’s task as one team. Eleven practice areas, ranging from intellectual property and tax law to bankruptcy, pharmaceutical regulation and environmental compliance. Alongside them sits a separate offering — a project office assembled around non-standard problems.

The firm has been on the market since 2010 and holds positions in Pravo-300 and Expert RA, the two principal rankings of the Russian legal market. The expertise was there; online, it was invisible. The existing site had neither a structure capable of holding that scope nor a visual language distinguishing the firm from hundreds of comparable legal websites.

The brief said “build a modern website.” The actual problem was different: turn a complex organisation into navigation a visitor can read, so that anyone arriving with a legal problem finds it in one click.

What the research showed

Before design began, our business analyst examined how B2B clients choose legal counsel. Four findings shaped the architecture.

People search for their problem, not for a service. Nobody searches for “law firm.” They search for “support during a field tax audit,” “challenging a transaction in bankruptcy proceedings,” “licence for a hazardous industrial facility” — real queries, in Russian, each carrying a specific situation. That means every practice area needs its own page: an entry point from search and a landing page for one concrete pain at the same time.

The decision rests on evidence, not on claims. In legal services the cost of choosing wrongly is high, so prospects look for proof: ranking positions, specific cases won, the names of the lawyers who won them. Abstract phrases about years of experience actively work against a firm here.

A law firm runs on content. Legal analysis, commentary on new legislation, quotes in the press — this is the primary trust channel in the sector. But the people producing that content are lawyers, who have neither the time nor the inclination to learn a CMS. Publishing therefore has to be simple enough that they don’t hand it to a developer.

Enquiries are not interchangeable. A tax dispute enquiry, a request for accounting support and a job application are three separate flows that should not land in the same inbox.

Solution

The company’s name became the design system. Alta Via means “high road” in Latin. We built the entire visual language on it: the homepage promises to clear the obstacles on your road to the summit, the call to action reads “clear the path,” and animated shards drift across the page — those shards are the obstacles. The animation is not decoration. Remove it and the metaphor collapses, leaving an ordinary corporate site. This is the rare case where animated elements cannot be switched off for performance reasons without losing the meaning of the page.

Eleven practice areas, eleven entrances. Each practice has its own page with a description, the team behind it and relevant case studies. The menu uses a mega-navigation with an icon per area, so a visitor recognises theirs in a second instead of reading a list. For search, this is eleven independent landing pages rather than one generic “Services.”

The Project Office section, which sells the complex part. Comprehensive business support cannot be sold as a list of services, because the client cannot tell what they would be buying. So instead of enumerating capabilities, we described seven situations that call for a mixed team: management transition, digitisation of internal processes, early-stage business, mergers and acquisitions, restructuring of the organisation, retained support, legal audit. The visitor recognises their own situation rather than studying a price list.

A content hub built as a working tool for lawyers. Four sections: legal analysis, video material, press coverage, and an archive. Every item is tied to its author and to a practice area, so a reader sees that an analysis of a tax dispute was written by a specific lawyer from the tax practice. Publishing is set up for the lawyer to do it directly. The proof is in the timeline: the site’s legal documents were updated in January 2026, two years after handover — the client works with the site independently.

Credibility expressed in numbers. Ranking positions in Pravo-300 and Expert RA, years on the market, the number of times the firm has been recognised in its field — not buried in an “About us” paragraph but presented as a dedicated block on the homepage. Below it: client logos and case studies attributed to named lawyers.

Enquiry routing built into the form. Four subject options — general questions, legal support, accounting, HR administration — plus separate forms for consultations, training registration and job applications. Each enquiry reaches the right specialist without manual sorting.

Two cities, two sets of contacts. Moscow and Omsk with their own phone numbers, addresses and email — which matters both for the visitor and for local search.

Adapted for every device. The animations were rebuilt for mobile rather than scaled down: several SVG scenes have dedicated mobile versions.

Under the hood

WordPress with a custom theme — not an assembly on top of an off-the-shelf template. That distinction is structural, not stylistic: an animated identity plus eleven practice areas with case studies and authors bound to each of them cannot be built on a template solution.

Animated SVG graphics with separate mobile scenes. Forms carrying personal-data consent notices as required by Russian data protection law (Federal Law 152-FZ). A downloadable company presentation in PDF. Yandex Metrica, the standard analytics platform for the Russian market, connected for tracking.

Result

• Structure: 22 pages, 11 practice areas, 7 project-office scenarios
• Live since 2024 with no redesign; the client publishes content in-house
• Development time: 8 weeks