Boutique scale. National weight.

Building a digital presence for a firm whose credibility had to arrive before the conversation did.

John Zummo spent most of twenty-nine years at large national firms — securities fraud defense on more than a billion dollars of mortgage-backed securities, post-M&A disputes, receiverships on Chicago high-rises. Then he went out on his own.

That's a positioning problem before it's a design problem. A general counsel weighing a $50 million dispute does not hand it to a solo practice on instinct. The site had to close that gap in the first four seconds, without overclaiming — because in law, a firm that looks bigger than it is has already lost the trust it was reaching for.

So the strategy was to stop apologizing for the scale and make it the argument. The same standard of work, on a smaller scale. The staffing model changed; the work didn't. Stated plainly, that's not a limitation — it's the reason to call.

Three practice areas — litigation, insolvency, transactions — initially read as three unrelated businesses. They aren't. Whether the matter is a failed acquisition, a defaulted credit facility, or a building in receivership, the question underneath is identical: what makes business sense, and how do we get there. The site is organized around that single throughline, so the breadth reads as range instead of dilution.

Credibility itself became a design problem. Twenty-nine years of practice is an abstraction. Thirty-two states, ten federal court admissions, and fourteen consecutive years in Illinois Super Lawyers is evidence — so the numbers were given structure and space rather than buried in a bio. Below them, selected matters carry their court, their venue, their outcome, and where reported, their citation. Not adjectives. Docket entries.

The visual system is deliberately restrained: a quiet editorial hierarchy, generous margins, and no ornament anywhere. In a category where credibility is the entire product, the most persuasive thing a design can do is get out of the way and let the record speak.