What Is Architecture-First Legal Content Development?

When someone assigns a legal content page, it can be tempting to start writing almost immediately. You have the topic. You know roughly what needs to be covered. Maybe you have a brief to work from. So you open a document and start drafting.

We worked that way for years. Eventually, we started noticing how much of the finished page depended on decisions we were making before we wrote it. The more attention we gave those decisions, the less we had to figure out while drafting. That realization became the basis for architecture-first legal content development. 

The idea is simple: writing the page should not be the first time you decide what you are building. And once you look at legal content that way, the usual jump from assignment to draft starts to look a little different.

What Most Legal Content Development Looks Like

Most legal content starts with a brief. You get the assignment, see what you’ve been asked to cover, and start writing.

We worked that way for years.

The brief wasn’t the problem. It gave us what we needed to begin. But once we started writing, we’d often find ourselves stopping to make decisions about the page that hadn’t been made yet.

Maybe we knew the topic, but we hadn’t decided how the page should move from one idea to the next. So we figured it out while we were drafting.

For a long time, that didn’t seem unusual. Writing a page naturally involves making decisions as you go. But after enough legal content projects, we started noticing a difference between decisions about the writing and decisions about the page itself.

Once we saw the difference, it became easier to separate the two. If we were stopping in the middle of a draft to decide how the page should work, we could make those decisions before we started writing instead.

This is our thinking behind architecture-first legal content development.

What Is Architecture-First Legal Content Development?

Architecture-first legal content development means deciding how a page needs to work before you start writing it.

The topic alone can’t tell you that. Two pages can cover the same area of law and still need to do very different jobs. Architecture is where you make that distinction. Instead of starting with everything you could say about a topic, you start with what this particular page needs to accomplish.

This is also where architecture differs from a brief. A brief gives the writer the assignment. Architecture takes that assignment and looks more closely at the page the writer is being asked to create.

An outline is different too. You can put together a perfectly reasonable set of headings and still have sections that overlap or spend too much time on something the reader didn’t need from this page. Architecture gives you a reason for the choices behind the outline before you settle on the headings themselves.

Writing has its own job after that. Once you know what the page needs to accomplish, you can focus on explaining the subject in a way that makes sense to the person reading it.

Architecture-first simply moves those page decisions ahead of the draft. The next question is what, exactly, you can decide that early.

What Does Architecture Consider Before Drafting Begins?

So what are you actually deciding before you write?

A lot of it comes down to questions you might otherwise run into halfway through the draft. Answering them ahead of time can change what eventually makes it onto the page. Architecture considers questions like these:

• What is this page supposed to do? A workers’ compensation page written for someone who was just hurt at work has a different job from a page explaining one narrow question about an existing claim. Covering the same area of law doesn’t make them interchangeable.

• Why did the reader come looking for this page? Someone searching a specific legal question usually wants to get to the answer quickly. The page shouldn’t make them work through a long introduction before getting there.

• What has the website already covered? A new page doesn’t need to repeat an explanation another page already handles well. Sometimes its job is to pick up where that page leaves off.

• What does each section need to contribute? Two sections can sound different on an outline and still end up doing the same job once they’re written. Catching that before drafting gives each section something different to add.

• Where could this page repeat something unnecessarily? Legal topics naturally cross over from one page to another. You can decide what belongs here without rewriting information the website already gives the reader somewhere else.

• What will the reader still need to know before they leave? A page can cover its assigned topic and still leave the reader with an obvious unanswered question. It’s better to notice that before the page is finished.

None of these questions tells you how to write the page. They help settle what the writing will need to do. When those decisions are made before drafting, you can see the result in the finished page.

Why Architecture Changes the Finished Page

Think about the last legal page you read all the way through. You probably weren’t thinking about how it had been planned. You were paying attention to whether you could find what you came for without having to work too hard to get there. Architecture affects that experience before the writing begins.

• You can tell why the page exists. A page about what happens after a denied disability claim shouldn’t spend most of its time giving a general introduction to disability benefits. The reader came with a more specific problem, and the page should stay with it.

• The sections build on each other. The reader shouldn’t finish one section only to find the next one backing up and explaining the same idea again. Each section should give them a reason to keep reading.

• Information shows up where you expect it. If the page raises a question, the reader shouldn’t have to hunt several sections later for the answer. Planning helps keep related information together instead of scattering it throughout the draft.

• The page doesn’t feel like it could live anywhere. A legal page should make sense on the website it was written for. It should fit with what the firm has already published without sounding like another version of a page that already exists.

None of this guarantees what happens after someone visits the page. Architecture simply means the writer isn’t waiting until the draft to decide how the page should work. After thousands of legal content projects, we knew we didn’t want to leave those decisions to the drafting process anymore. Eventually, we developed a formal way to make them before the writing began.

Why This Philosophy Became a Methodology

We didn’t set out to create a methodology. For a long time, architecture was simply part of how we prepared to write.

But the volume of the work changed what we could see. After planning more than 20,000 legal pages, we had worked across enough practice areas and websites to recognize when the same issues kept coming back. We also knew we couldn’t rely on memory every time we planned a new page.

We needed to be consistent about the questions we answered before drafting and the decisions we made from those answers.

The philosophy came first. The methodology came later.

The Acadia Method™ grew from the way we had learned to approach legal content before we wrote it. Formalizing that work gave us a consistent way to use what we had learned across future projects without treating every new assignment like we were starting from scratch.

Architecture-first legal content development is still the philosophy behind it. The methodology is how we put that philosophy into practice.

See What Architecture-First Legal Content Development Looks Like in Practice

The Acadia Method™ grew from this philosophy and gives us a consistent way to put it into practice across the legal content we write. You’ll find more throughout the Library about the decisions that happen before drafting and why they matter once a page is finished. And if you’re looking for legal content developed with that level of planning behind it, we’d be happy to talk about what you’re working on.

How We Audit Legal Content Briefs Before Drafting Begins

When a legal content brief comes in, we don’t open a blank document and start writing. We read the brief first and spend some time with the assignment before we touch the draft.

We’ve worked from legal content briefs for years, and one thing has become pretty obvious: a good brief can give you exactly what you need and still deserve a closer look before you start writing. You may understand the assignment perfectly and still notice something that needs to be addressed before it becomes part of the page.

That’s why we review every brief before we draft from it. We want to know what we’re being asked to write and whether there’s anything we need to deal with before the writing starts. Sometimes there is. Sometimes there isn’t. Either way, we’d rather know before we’re halfway through the page.

A Legal Content Brief Can’t Answer Every Question

A brief has to stop somewhere. If it tried to answer every question that could come up while writing the page, it would probably be longer than the page itself.

And it still couldn’t tell us everything.

Some answers depend on what we find after we receive the assignment. Say a brief asks for a section explaining a particular legal issue. On paper, the section makes perfect sense. But when we review the firm’s website, we may find an entire page dedicated to the same issue. Now we have something to think about before we write another version of information the firm already has.

The person who created the brief didn’t miss anything. The assignment simply gave us a reason to look more closely.

We’ve seen situations like this even with incredibly detailed briefs. Once you start reviewing the assignment alongside the website it was written for, you can learn things that wouldn’t necessarily belong in the brief in the first place.

For us, that’s enough reason to give every assignment its own review instead of assuming a completed brief means there’s nothing left to check.

Acadia Reviews the Brief Before Writing the Page

Once you start writing from a brief, you’re already working inside the assignment. You’re thinking about what to say under the first heading instead of stopping to ask whether that heading should be there at all.

We want to do that part first.

After thousands of legal content projects, we’ve learned how easy it is to keep moving once the draft has started. If something in the brief feels a little off, you may still write it because you’re already in the middle of the page.

Reviewing first gives us a chance to catch that before we get there.

Sometimes everything in the brief works exactly as written. Other times, there’s one part we want to look at more closely before we draft from it. Either way, we’d rather make that call while we’re still looking at the assignment than after we’ve already started writing the page.

Once the review is done, we can move into drafting without still wondering whether something in the brief needs another look.

The Brief Gives Us a Place to Start

Reading the brief tells us what we’ve been asked to write. Reviewing it is when we get a chance to question something before we follow the assignment onto the page. We’re not looking for problems. Usually, something in the brief simply makes us stop and think, Do we know enough to write this the way it’s been assigned? A few questions come up often:

• Does the assignment match what someone searching for this topic actually needs? A brief may focus heavily on explaining the law when the person searching is more likely to be wondering what they can do next. We want to notice that difference before we spend most of the page answering a question they didn’t come to ask.

• Are we being asked to give something more attention than it needs? A brief can devote an entire section to a point that only needs a short explanation on the finished page. We don’t assume the amount of space something gets in the brief has to determine how much space it gets in the draft.

• Is anything missing that would leave the reader confused? Sometimes the brief gets us almost all the way there, but one answer is needed to make the rest of the page make sense. We want to catch that before we start writing so the answer has a place on the page.

• Is anything in the assignment unclear to us? We don’t guess our way through instructions we aren’t sure about. If we need an answer from the client before we can write what they asked for, the review is when we want to find that out.

We won’t have all four questions on every assignment. Sometimes we won’t have any of them. Giving the brief its own review simply gives us a chance to ask. The reader will never know which questions came up before we wrote the page. They’ll just know whether the page gives them what they came looking for.

Readers Never See the Review, but They See the Results

By the time someone reads the finished page, they’ll never know what changed between the brief and the draft. They’ll only see the version that made it through the review. Sometimes the change is tiny. Other times, one question during the review changes a whole section. Those changes can show up in a few different ways:

• A long section in the brief may end up much shorter on the page. Once we look at what someone really needs from that section, we may realize a few strong paragraphs are enough.

• The page may answer something the brief never mentioned. If we notice a question the reader is likely to have, we can make room for it before the draft is written.

• A section may move. Something can make sense in one place on the brief and work better somewhere else once we think about how the page will read from top to bottom.

• The explanation may get more specific. A short note in the brief can turn into a much more focused section once we understand what the reader is actually trying to figure out.

Most readers will never know any of those changes happened, and they don’t need to. They’re there to read the page, not the brief behind it. After seeing the same kinds of changes come out of review again and again, we eventually built a consistent way to do that work before drafting begins.

The Review Became Part of How We Work

For a while, reviewing a brief more closely was something we did when the assignment gave us a reason to stop. After enough projects, we realized we didn’t want to wait for a reason.

We had seen too many cases where a brief looked ready to go until we spent more time with it. Nothing was necessarily wrong with the assignment. We had just learned that the first read didn’t always tell us everything we wanted to know before writing from it.

After planning more than 20,000 legal pages, that was enough for us to make brief review part of every assignment. We stopped waiting for something to catch our attention first.

That review eventually became part of The Acadia Method™. We took something we had learned from years of doing the work and made it a consistent part of how we prepare to write. Once the review is finished, we can move on knowing the brief has already had a closer look.

See What Happens After the Brief Review

Once the brief has been reviewed, we know whether anything needs to be clarified before the assignment moves forward. From there, the rest of the planning can begin. The Acadia Method™ is where that work comes together. And throughout the Library, we’ll keep breaking down what happens before a legal page is ready to be written.

Why So Much Legal Content Fails Even Before Drafting

You get a legal page back from drafting, read through it, and immediately start making changes. The introduction feels off, so you rewrite it. Two sections say almost the same thing, so you combine them. The page feels thin in one spot, so you ask for another section. A few rounds later, the writing is cleaner, but you still have the same nagging feeling: this page is not what you wanted.

Sometimes the problem was never the writing. We have seen projects where the writer was asked to cover too much on one page, where two pages were assigned nearly identical jobs, or where nobody had decided what a page needed to accomplish before the draft was ordered. A writer can follow those instructions well and still produce a page that needs major changes afterward. Editing can absolutely improve the draft. But if the trouble came from what the page was assigned to do in the first place, changing sentences alone will not fix it.

Revising the Draft Doesn’t Always Fix the Page

Revision can make a real difference in a legal page. An introduction can take too long to get to the point. A section can repeat information the reader already got three paragraphs earlier. Sometimes the explanation is right, but the way it is written makes it harder to understand than it needs to be. Those are writing problems, and editing is exactly where you should fix them.

The trouble starts when you keep editing and the same problem keeps coming back.

We have worked on city-level car accident pages, for example, where the firm already had a statewide page covering the same practice area. If the assignment never explained what the city page needed to do differently, the writer has to make that call while drafting. You can rewrite the page afterward, add local details, or rearrange what is already there. None of those changes answers the question the assignment skipped: why does the firm need both pages, and what should someone find here that they will not find on the other one?

We have seen the other side of this, too. Some pages come back from drafting and need very little changed because those questions were answered beforehand. Everyone already knew why the page was being written, where it fit on the website, and what belonged on it. Revision could then stay where it belonged: making good writing better instead of trying to decide what the page should have been.

Writers make plenty of decisions once they start drafting. But they do not start with a blank slate. A surprising number of decisions about the page have already been made for them.

Every Draft Starts With Decisions Already Made

When you send a legal page to a writer, you are not handing them an empty page and asking them to decide what belongs there. You have already made some of those decisions.

You chose the topic because you want a page about it on the firm’s website. If you provided an outline, you also decided which sections the writer should cover. Even the title tells the writer something about how specific the page should be and which questions belong somewhere else.

The writer still has plenty of decisions to make. The assignment determines how many of those decisions they have to make without your input.

Imagine you order a page for a law firm that already has 200 pages on its website. The writer receives the title, target keywords, word count, and outline, but nothing about those existing pages. They now have to decide how much background information to include without knowing where else you have covered it. If the outline calls for a section on damages, they have no reason to know you wanted this page to approach damages differently from the firm’s other practice area pages. They can follow the assignment exactly and give you something you did not intend to order.

We have seen versions of this across thousands of legal content projects. The instructions a writer receives determine what they know before they start researching and which decisions are left to them during drafting.

So when a choice in the finished page feels wrong, it helps to look at what the writer had in front of them before deciding where the problem came from. Sometimes the assignment made the choice. Other times, it left the writer to make a judgment without enough context.

Either way, the draft is showing you the result of decisions that started before the writing did.

Some Problems Exist Before the First Sentence

You can approve a legal content assignment without seeing anything obviously wrong with it. The firm handles the type of case, and the outline looks reasonable enough to send to a writer. Problems can be much easier to spot when the draft comes back and you see what the writer actually had room and permission to cover.

Here are a few ways a page can run into trouble before the writing starts:

• Another page already gives the reader most of the same information. A firm has a detailed car accident page and orders another page about what to do after a crash. If both pages explain what someone should do immediately after an accident, rewriting the second one will not give the reader much they could not already find on the first.

• You know the topic, but not what the person searching for it wants to know. “Felony drug possession” gives you a subject. Someone facing the charge could land on the page trying to find out what happens after an arrest. If the assignment never accounts for that question, the draft can spend most of its space explaining the offense instead.

• The firm wants another city page, but changing the city does not change the information. If the existing personal injury page and the new location page are both assigned the same general material, adding local references will not keep the pages from repeating each other.

• A related question needs more room than this page can give it. Imagine a DUI page briefly mentioning license suspension when the firm has no separate page explaining the licensing process. Either the writer interrupts the DUI discussion to explain it or leaves the reader with only part of the answer.

• The outline gives valuable space to information the reader can already find elsewhere. If several hundred words of a wrongful death page are reserved for a general negligence explanation, there is less room to explain who has the legal right to file the wrongful death claim.

• Two assignments allow writers to cover the same ground. Separate workplace injury and workers’ compensation pages can both reasonably discuss what happens when someone gets hurt at work. Without a clear dividing line between the assignments, both writers have a reason to include it.

Once the draft comes back, you finally have words in front of you that you can change. You can cut a repetitive section or ask the writer to replace it, but the next version still has to fit the same assignment unless someone goes back and changes what the page was asked to cover. The draft is often where you notice the problem. It is not necessarily where the problem started.

The Draft Can’t Correct the Wrong Starting Point

You read a draft and find a section that takes up far too much of the page. You send it back and ask the writer to cut it. The revised section is better, but the rest of the page still feels underdeveloped.

The writer made the change you requested. Cutting the section just exposed something the original assignment never answered: what did you want the page to spend that space discussing instead?

Say you ordered a 2,000-word medical malpractice page and the outline gave a large portion of it to common medical errors. Once you read the draft, you realize the section is taking attention away from questions about whether someone may have a claim and what they’ll need to prove. You ask the writer to shorten it.

Now the writer has room to give another subject more attention, but the assignment never said which one. They can make that decision themselves, or you can give them more direction and review another revision.

Either approach can improve the page. But at this point, you’re not asking the writer to make the existing writing stronger. You’re deciding what the page should cover and how much space different information should get. The draft didn’t cause either of those questions. It just gave you something concrete enough to finally see them.

We kept seeing revisions turn into decisions that could’ve been made before drafting started. Eventually, we stopped waiting for a finished page to make those questions obvious. We started asking them before the writer began.

The Same Issues Kept Showing Up

We didn’t change how we planned legal content because of one difficult project. By the time we had planned and written more than 20,000 legal pages, we had seen enough drafts go through revision to recognize how many questions could be answered before a writer ever opened a document.

Eventually, waiting for a finished draft to answer those questions felt backwards. If a decision could change what the writer researched or how they used 2,000 words, we wanted to make it while we were still planning the assignment.

That’s where architecture-first legal content development came from.

We stopped treating everything before drafting as preparation for the writing and started giving it more attention of its own. Instead of handing the writer an assignment and dealing with unanswered questions as they appeared in the draft, we wanted to answer as many of them as we reasonably could beforehand.

Architecture-first legal content development is how we do that work at Acadia today. It gives us time to make decisions about the page before those decisions have to become paragraphs.

Fix the Right Problem First

If you want to see what happens before we draft, keep reading through the Acadia Library or take a closer look at The Acadia Method™. If you’re already planning legal content and want another set of eyes on it, contact Acadia. We can review the assignment before drafting starts and help you decide what needs attention first.