When a Law Firm Website Hides a Floating Bodega Cat

Case study: The Law Office of Jason Browne PLLC / attorneyjaybrowne.com

The Business

Jason "Jay" Browne is a Brooklyn landlord-tenant attorney who is very good at two things: the law, and helping people. He has practiced in Kings County Housing Court since 2012, out of an office in Boerum Hill, a ten-minute walk from the courthouse at 141 Livingston Street. He represents tenants fighting eviction and landlords protecting property, and he is the kind of lawyer who actually picks up the phone. The kind who answers a call from a random number on a Saturday because a family got illegally locked out, and has fought to get families back in their homes fast, sometimes the same day.

He also runs a business. And running a business is a different sport than practicing law.

Most law firm websites look like they were assembled from the same three stock photos: a gavel, a handshake, and a city skyline at dusk. Jay did not want that. He told me, point blank, to do something different. Make it not look like every other lawyer in the borough. Catch people's attention.

That is a rare brief. Most clients say they want different and then flinch the moment you show them different. Jay meant it.

The Problem

A law firm has two jobs on its website that pull in opposite directions.

It has to be credible. Nobody hires a housing attorney off a site that feels like a joke, especially not someone about to lose their home. But it also has to be human, because the people who need a landlord-tenant lawyer are usually having one of the worst weeks of their lives, and a wall of legal jargon does not help them.

Most firms solve this by picking credibility and sanding off every trace of personality. The result is technically professional and completely forgettable. You read it, you feel nothing, you close the tab.

Jay's whole value is the human part. A website that buried that under stock photography was actively lying about who he is.

There was a second problem underneath the first. Jay is a brilliant lawyer who would rather be lawyering than running a company, and the running-a-company part is the part that wears on him. He cannot personally answer every tenant in Brooklyn facing an eviction notice. He wants to. He physically cannot. People were falling through the cracks not because Jay did not care, but because there is one of him and a whole borough of people who need help.

What Smatthew Built

I did not build Jay a website. I built Jay a system, and the website is the part you can see.

The site itself

I used Gemini's image tools for the artwork and Claude for the code, and built a site that leans into something Jay loves: video games. Not any specific game, nobody is getting a cease and desist over this. Just the feeling of a retro arcade adventure. The site even says it out loud: your quest for justice starts here. It is the kind of nostalgia that makes a certain kind of person grin before they know why.

Then I hid things in it.

The Easter eggs

There is a legendary cheat code that anyone who grew up with a controller in their hands knows by heart. Up, up, down, down, you know the rest. I built it into the site, because I knew the exact moment Jay would find it. He would punch in the code, a floating chonker bodega cat would appear, and he would laugh. He did. It was great.

The site's Navigation Orb, always on screen for visitors to click for help, is the feature the firm gets the most unprompted comments about. It guides people to the intake form page, but if they click it again it runs through 30 rotating one-liners that humorously explain why the only way to get Jay on the phone is filling out a form (hit it a 30th time and it takes a coffee break). People find it, they tell the firm, and they remember the firm because of it. A housing law office got memorable. That basically never happens.

The self-help tools

This is the part I care about most. Because Jay cannot reach everyone, I built free interactive tools into the site that let people help themselves. A rent-stabilization checker. An overcharge calculator. A case evaluator. There is even a small arcade game where you defend Brooklyn tenants from eviction threats. If someone lands on the site at 11pm with an illegal lockout and Jay is asleep like a normal human, the tools are still awake. That is Jay's "I want to help everyone" instinct, turned into something that runs without him in the room.

The content engine

Here is the part people get wrong, so let me be precise. I write Jay's content. I am a stand-up comedian who can write, and the words come from a human who knows how to hold an audience. What I do is take real stories, ones Jay has told me or ones I lived through with him, change every name to protect the people involved, and build each one around a real legal lesson.

The AI is the safety net, not the writer. I run agents that check the things a comedian should not be guessing at: that the SEO is strong, that the voice matches Jay's exactly, and that every legal point is correct before it ever reaches him. Because the last thing I want is the lawyer calling me to say I misread a statute. That would be annoying, and worse, it would be wrong. The agents catch it first. Jay reviews and approves a piece that is already right.

The actual job

Somewhere in here I stopped being a content person and became Jay's CXO. I am on call. I have a business email at the firm so I can track what is happening. Sometimes I step in and direct his team. I built a separate agent that runs the firm's HR, the hiring process, the SOPs, all of it. The website was the beginning. What it turned into was an operations brain for a business whose owner would rather be lawyering.

The Result

The website launched and the business moved.

Since the February 2026 rebuild, Jay has more than doubled his client base and tripled his intake calls. Those are not vanity numbers. Clients are revenue and intake calls are the top of the funnel that becomes revenue. The site stopped being a brochure and started being the front door of a growing firm.

The softer result matters too. The firm became the one people mention. Visitors click the Navigation Orb, stumble onto the hidden Bodega Cat, and tell the firm about both. A landlord-tenant attorney in Brooklyn is now memorable in a category where memorable does not exist. That is brand, and Jay got it without buying a single billboard.

And Jay got his time back. The self-help tools, the content engine, the HR agent, all of it absorbs work that used to require Jay personally. He gets to spend more of his hours doing the thing he is great at, winning cases in Kings County, instead of the parts of running a firm he never wanted to do.

The Difference

An agency would have sold Jay a website, invoiced him, and moved on. He would own a nicer brochure and the same problems.

The difference is that I am embedded. I am not a vendor Jay emails when something breaks. I am the person who knows that he cannot answer every call, and that the fastest way to make him laugh is a cat where a cat should not be. I built the site, and then I built the systems around the site, and then I started running the parts of the business he does not want to run.

That is the model. Not "here is your website." Closer to "I am the operations brain you plug in next to the thing you are brilliant at, so the brilliant thing is all you have to do."

Jay wanted a site that did not look like every other lawyer's. He got that. He also got a business that runs better than it did the day before launch. The floating cat was just the part that made him smile.

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