Hill Dickinson

A Digital Transformation to Disrupt the Legal Market

Translating Hill Dickinson’s people-first brand into an enterprise-grade digital platform

Overview

Hill Dickinson is a leading UK firm advising clients across the maritime, health and commercial sectors. While its culture and client relationships were progressive and commercially focused, its digital presence did not reflect the confidence or scale of the business. The firm embarked on a coordinated rebrand and website initiative to establish a true digital flagship. As part of the website programme, Hill Dickinson partnered with Novicell to deliver a ground-up transformation of the firm’s digital platform, re-architecting site structure, sharpening industry-led value propositions and calibrating the experience to contemporary B2B buying behaviour. Within that transformation, the mandate for the website was clear: to create a business development platform that simplifies the client journey, connects users to expertise with precision and clearly communicates the firm’s brand.

"The website is a core expression of our brand, and Novicell brought the technical expertise needed to deliver it at scale. The platform gives us the flexibility to present who we are, the precision to connect clients with the right expertise and a foundation built to support growth over time."

Lisa Robinson-Behnejad

Director of Business Development and Marketing

Platform rigidity: A restrictive CMS made even minor content updates cumbersome, slowing response to market developments and pulling the marketing team away from higher-value work.
Discovery breakdown: Search and navigation produced undifferentiated results, making it difficult for users to quickly connect with the right lawyers, insights or services.
Brand expression trade-offs: The existing architecture could not support the firm’s new visual identity without sacrificing performance, forcing compromises between brand expression and site speed.
Data and integration inefficiency: Siloed management of lawyer profiles, events and content required manual intervention, increasing operational risk and creating inconsistencies across platforms.

To support its growth ambitions, Hill Dickinson needed a future-ready digital foundation that was secure, fast and engineered to scale, capable of expressing the new brand, enabling business development and evolving alongside the firm’s priorities.

Living Group led the development of the visual identity and experience principles, while Novicell translated those ambitions into a flexible, component-based architecture built on Umbraco CMS and Microsoft Azure. Together, the teams designed a composable, component-first digital architecture that allows the brand to scale consistently across pages, campaigns and content types without sacrificing speed, security or editorial control. Rather than relying on rigid templates, the platform is built from flexible, reusable components that give marketing teams the freedom to evolve layouts and content while maintaining enterprise-grade governance and performance standards.