Sarfati Associates

The Brief

Sarfati & Associates is a boutique European law firm in banking, finance and cross-border transactions, with offices in the Netherlands, France and Luxembourg, and a Montréal office announced as opening. It advises banks, funds, family offices and financial institutions on securitisation, private debt and structured products.

Its website said almost none of that. I started with an audit and the findings were blunt. The footer's social icons linked to the site builder's own placeholder accounts, so anyone clicking them left the firm entirely. Draft URLs such as /copy-of-welcome were still published. No page carried a meta description. Body copy was marked up as H3 headings throughout, which flattens the structure search engines read. The expertise page held a quotation, some images and little else. There was no privacy notice, which for an EU practice is a problem of its own.

What I Built

A six page site: Welcome, Vision, Expertise, Solutions, Team and Contact, with privacy, terms and cookie pages behind them. It is a brochure site and I would not dress it up as more.

Most of the work was editorial. I kept the founder's own words where they were good and wrote new copy only where pages were empty, positioning the firm around structured finance rather than law in general: securitisation, alternative investment funds, private debt, regulatory structuring. Solutions became a grid of six cards, each holding a slot for a short interview video of the founder answering one question. The team page finally gave the practice faces, bios and bar admissions.

Underneath: LegalService structured data, per page titles and descriptions, a sitemap, a cookie banner that withholds analytics until consent, and a robots file welcoming answer engine crawlers alongside search engines.

The hard part

The hard part was not the pages. It was deciding who should own the thing afterwards.

The original plan was to rebuild inside the site builder the firm was already using. It moved instead to plain files on ordinary hosting, with the old addresses redirected so nothing that had been shared or linked would break. The reasoning was ownership: the firm holds the domain, the files and the account, and any developer can pick the work up later without inheriting somebody else's tooling.

I also worked in the browser rather than in a deck, so what the client reviewed was the real thing and not a picture of it.

The rest was care with language. Where new copy named specific instruments, I flagged it for the founder to confirm rather than asserting it on his behalf. A law firm's website is a professional representation, and getting that wrong is not a typo.

Where It Stands

Designed, built and delivered. The client has not published it, so the firm's existing site is still what visitors see. Delivered work waiting on a client's timing is ordinary, and I would rather say so.

The relationship is current and continues past the website. The work has since moved to automating the firm's term sheet production, which is where the hours go.