A website and CV for a lawyer

The problem

A lawyer’s CV gets read in two places. A recruiter opens the PDF attached to an application. A hiring partner types the name into Google. Both have to tell the same story, and both have to look like they belong to someone who pays attention to detail.

Barbara works in the UK, but part of her professional network is Polish. Keeping two languages of a website and two languages of a CV in sync by hand means four documents. After the first change, one of them is always out of date.

There was also the question of tone. Legal recruitment is conservative. The site had to look considered and calm, not like a startup landing page.

The solution

One page, ordered the way a recruiter reads a CV.

1. Who she is. Name, qualifications (LLM Legal Practice Course with Distinction, LLB Hons) and current role, with a portrait, before anyone scrolls.
2. Numbers that matter. Four figures from her current work: claims resolved per year, active caseload, department ranking and her LLM grade.
3. Profile. Two short paragraphs on what she does and where her international experience comes from, including WIPO in Geneva.
4. Experience. A timeline with responsibilities and achievements separated, so the achievements don’t get lost in the bullet points.
5. Education, expertise and languages. Short, scannable cards.
6. Contact. Direct email and phone, plus the CV download.

The design pairs Cormorant Garamond for headings with Inter for body text, on navy, warm paper and a single gold accent. It reads like a chambers letterhead, not a template.

Two languages, one source

Every piece of text lives in one place as an English and Polish pair. The page renders in English and switches to Polish in place, with no reload and no separate URL. The choice is remembered, and browsers set to Polish get Polish on the first visit.

The Download CV button follows the language too. Someone reading in Polish gets the Polish PDF. The file saves as “Barbara Majewska CV.pdf”, not as a slug with hyphens, because it ends up in a recruiter’s downloads folder next to fifty others.

A CV generated, not designed by hand

The CV isn’t a Word document. A small Node script takes the same content, lays it out as an A4 page in HTML and prints it to PDF in headless Chrome, once in English and once in Polish. The typography, colours and portrait match the website.

This made it cheap to explore. Before settling on the final version we generated more than sixty variants: five colour schemes, several photo crops and backgrounds, with and without a portrait. Choosing between real PDFs is easier than choosing between descriptions.

When something changes, such as a promotion or a completed programme, the content is edited once and both PDFs and the site are rebuilt from it.

How it’s built

The site is statically generated with Astro and hosted on Vercel, deployed from Git on every push. The browser receives one HTML file with a few lines of inline script for the language switch, the mobile menu and scroll animations. There is no framework runtime and no external JavaScript.

There are no cookies, no analytics and no tracking, so there is no cookie banner either. A strict Content Security Policy, HSTS with preload and the usual hardening headers are set at the edge. Animations respect the reduced-motion setting, and the layout is designed for phones first, because that is where a link from LinkedIn opens.

What this changes

Barbara has a single address to put on applications, LinkedIn and email signatures, and a CV that always matches it. Recruiters in either language get the same story in their own language, without having to ask.

Keeping it current is no longer a project. The latest update added a portrait to the site and the CV, and a Polish version of the CV, in a single change.

See the site at barbara-majewska.com.