A modern member portal for the Texas Bar's General Practice section

A 40-year-old legal organization, finally with the portal its members deserve

The General Practice, Solo & Small Firm Section of the State Bar of Texas has been serving solo practitioners and small firms for more than four decades. Their old site was, charitably, a directory with a logo on top of it. Members couldn't update their own profiles, council governance lived in email threads, the document bank was a folder on someone's drive, and the "events" section was a static page that lagged the actual calendar by a quarter.

We rebuilt the whole thing — public marketing site, gated member portal, and the directory that ties them together — in time for the 2025 spring meeting.

At a glance

• Client since: 2024
• Members served: 1,900+ Texas attorneys
• Stack: Webflow (public site) + Brilliant Directories (member portal & directory)
• Sections: Public marketing pages, member directory, document bank, "The Docket" blog, events, council governance
• Services delivered: Discovery, web design, web development, portal configuration, member data migration, mass-email onboarding, training

The challenge: a directory that needed to become a network

Bar sections live or die on member engagement. The old site couldn't help: it had no member-facing controls, no way to surface the section's CLE work, and no path for prospective members to actually join. Council leadership was running the section out of inboxes — and 200+ members on the State Bar's roster didn't have an email address on file at all.

The new site had to do three jobs the old one didn't:

• Give every member a self-service profile in a searchable directory.
• Hold the section's privileged content — Document Bank, Resource Library, Event Archive, Council materials — behind a real login.
• Onboard 1,900+ existing members at once, without flooding the section's leadership with password-reset tickets the morning of launch.

The solution: split the stack, automate the join

A public site on Webflow

Marketing pages — Home, About, Membership, Events, The Docket — live on Webflow so the section's leadership can publish a blog post or a CLE announcement without opening a ticket. A "Join Today" CTA sits in the header on every page. Imagery was sourced and licensed for legal use — courthouse photography that reads like a Texas section, not a stock library.

A member portal on Brilliant Directories

The gated portal handles what Webflow can't: profile management, password-protected document libraries, a searchable member directory by city and practice area, council governance areas, and event archives that update without manual edits. New-member applications collect license number for State Bar verification, plus practice areas and biography in a single form.

The migration

We imported the section's full member roster from the State Bar — 1,900+ attorneys — into the directory pre-launch, with placeholder profiles every member could claim. For the 200+ members without an email address on file, we coordinated with the Bar to reach them through the Texas Bar Journal so no one was left outside the new portal.

The launch automation

The morning the portal went live, every member with an email got a personalized password-reset message routed through the portal's mailer — 1,900+ messages, each tied to a profile, with a single approve-and-send for council leadership. New-member applications now fire an admin approval workflow that goes to the membership chair instead of a generic inbox. Account-creation, password reset, document-bank notifications, and event RSVPs are all wired into the same automation layer, so council members can run the section without learning HTML.

The outcome

The section launched on time for the 2025 spring meeting, with 1,900+ members already in the directory and a full onboarding email already in their inboxes. The Document Bank, Resource Library, Event Archive, and Council governance pages — all things the old site couldn't host at all — are now live. "The Docket" gives the section a regular publishing cadence and the SEO surface area to recruit new solos who didn't know the section existed.

For an organization that had been operating on a 40-year-old playbook, the rebuild wasn't just a new website. It was the moment they stopped being a directory and started being a network.

76% of association members expect a personalized, modern digital experience. Organizations prioritizing digital experience reach 82% member engagement, versus 67% two years ago.

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