Legal Experts Direct is a directory intended for lawyers seeking expert witnesses to support their cases and is a signifigant milestone for me. It is intended to be a direct competitor to sites such as Juris Pro and Seak. The site made enough of a disruption in the Expert Witness industry to grab the attention of Juris Pro who attempted to sue and have the site taken down, but they did not succeed. The site has generated over 200k in revenue and has over 500 experts listed in only 6 months since deployment. I designed, developed, and deployed this site single handedly.
This site posed some significant challenges, the requirements included a Custom Post Type for Experts that would be easy to manage and maintain for nontechnical users. The second and larger challenge was figuring out how to implement custom search functionality that only searched entries in the Expert CPT, only searched in the Expert CPT taxonomy based on fields filled out in a form. It took 2 - 3 months of research and testing before I came up with a suitable solution.
A second directory was requested and this presented an opportunity for me to refine my work, I came up with a much better solution that was free of bugs and significantly more reliable. Since creating this I have been implementing the same technique in other work to create a custom search for CPTs, I again expanded on this work while building a website for tattoo studio Signal, which I detail here. Overall building this site was a challenging and rewarding experience that I think gave me the ability to add real value to websites.
