HEADLESS CMS CASE STUDY

360 Legal Forms: A Legacy Platform Rebuilt on Strapi and Next.js

How WebSpero re-platformed 360 Legal Forms from a legacy Laravel monolith to a headless Strapi CMS with a Next.js frontend, migrating 270+ attorney-crafted legal templates with zero data loss and handing the client team full CMS control.

270+

Templates Migrated
From Laravel to Strapi

100%

Content Preserved
Zero Data Loss

0

Downtime
Live Platform Uninterrupted

Headless

CMS Architecture
Strapi + Next.js

Project Context

Client
360 Legal Forms

Niche
Legal Tech · Headless CMS Rebuild

The Tech Stack

  • Next.js (Frontend)
  • Strapi CMS (Headless Backend)
  • MySQL (Database)
  • Node.js (Runtime + Migration Pipeline)
  • Custom Data Transformation Scripts

"We wanted to modernize 360 Legal Forms with a fresh design and a platform our team could manage without relying on developers. WebSpero rebuilt the site on Strapi CMS, making it easy to manage documents and content while improving performance, SEO, and scalability."

The brief was clear: retire the legacy Laravel stack, replace it with a modern headless CMS, and hand the day-to-day of the site back to the 360 Legal Forms team. Every legal template, every page, every URL had to survive the migration intact.

Jeff Mosler
360 Legal Forms

THE PLATFORM

360 Legal Forms: A Modern Headless Platform for Attorney-Crafted Legal Documents

360 Legal Forms is a leading online platform where individuals and small businesses create, customize, and securely manage attorney-crafted legal documents in minutes. WebSpero rebuilt the platform from its legacy Laravel monolith to a modern headless architecture: Strapi CMS on the backend, Next.js on the frontend. 270+ legal templates were migrated cleanly and every page is now editable by the 360 Legal Forms team without developer involvement.

For Legal Document Users

  • Choose from 270+ attorney-crafted legal templates for personal, family, business, and financial use
  • Customize forms through an intuitive online editor
  • Generate legally structured documents instantly
  • Save, edit, and manage documents securely from any device
  • Download and print in multiple formats
  • Sign and share documents online
  • Persistent authenticated sessions via secure cookies

HOW WE BUILT IT

A Structured, Migration-First Process for a Legacy Rebuild

A legacy modernization is not a new build. It is an audit, a plan, a series of controlled cutovers, and a handover. Every milestone below was designed to protect the existing content, the existing URLs, and the existing user experience while the underlying stack was completely replaced.

DISCOVERY

A working session with the 360 Legal Forms team to capture the modernization goals, the legacy Laravel

pain points, and what independent CMS control had to look like on day one.

LEGACY AUDIT

Mapped the Laravel data model, catalogued all 270+ legal templates and their relationships, and identified

every URL, redirect, and SEO signal that had to survive the migration.

ARCHITECTURE & PLANNING

Designed Strapi content models to fit the legal domain, planned the Next.js

frontend structure, and sequenced a phased delivery roadmap with zero-downtime as a hard constraint.

STRAPI CMS BUILD

Built the Strapi backend: content types for legal documents, pages, articles, and services, plus custom

endpoints and reusable components ready for the marketing team.

NEXT.JS FRONTEND

Rebuilt the frontend in Next.js: SEO-friendly static and server-rendered pages, the document editor UI,

and every user journey from browse to customize to download.

DATA MIGRATION

Wrote custom transformation scripts that moved 270+ templates and every piece of associated metadata

from Laravel into Strapi, with integrity checks on every record.

SEO & QA

Preserved every existing URL, verified schema and metadata across templates, and ran cross-browser QA

on the user flows so search visibility and UX survived the cutover.

LAUNCH & HANDOVER

Deployed the new stack with a zero-downtime cutover, trained the 360 Legal Forms team on Strapi,

and handed over full source, documentation, and CMS access.

WHAT WE BUILT

Seven Building Blocks of a Modernized Legal Documents Platform

The rebuild ships as a set of connected systems: a headless CMS, a modern frontend, a migration pipeline, and the SEO and content controls that make the whole thing sustainable for the 360 Legal Forms team.

Strapi CMS Backbone

The new content layer. Custom content types for legal documents, pages, articles, and services, plus custom API endpoints tuned for the frontend. Roles and permissions built so the 360 Legal Forms team can manage their own content without touching code.

Next.js Frontend Rebuild

A modern React-based frontend built for speed and search. Static generation where it counts, server-side rendering where content is dynamic, and clean routing that reuses every existing URL. The user experience is preserved, but the delivery is faster and more search-friendly.

Legal Template Library: 270+ Migrated

270+ attorney-crafted legal templates spanning personal, family, business, and financial documents. Every template was migrated with its metadata, categorisation, and content structure intact, ready to render from Strapi through Next.js on day one.

Custom Data Transformation Pipeline

The Laravel schema and the Strapi content model were not identical. Custom transformation scripts read every legacy record, remapped fields, preserved relationships, and wrote clean data into Strapi. Integrity checks on every record confirmed zero loss before cutover.

SEO and URL Preservation Layer

Every legacy URL was catalogued and preserved in the Next.js routing layer. Metadata, structured data, and canonical URLs were rebuilt to match or improve on the old stack. Search rankings and inbound traffic survived the migration intact.

Reusable Content Models & Components

Content types and Strapi components were designed for reuse: the same building blocks power legal template pages, service pages, articles, and marketing pages. Adding a new content category takes minutes, not a sprint.

Independent Content Management for the 360 Legal Forms Team

The 360 Legal Forms marketing and admin teams now own their content end to end. Pages, articles, legal documents, and services can be added, edited, or restructured from the Strapi UI without a developer in the loop. That was the point of the rebuild: to hand the platform back to the team that runs the business.

THE CHALLENGES WE SOLVED

Rebuilding a Live Legal Platform Without Losing a Byte or a URL

A legacy modernization on a platform that is already live, already ranking, and already trusted by users is a specific class of engineering problem. Six challenges shaped the build:

Migrating Laravel Data to Strapi

The Laravel data model and Strapi content model were built for different systems. We wrote custom transformation scripts to reshape 270+ templates into Strapi’s structure without dropping fields, relationships, or metadata.

Preserving Document Relationships

Legal templates carry categorisation, versioning, and cross-references. Every relationship in the legacy data was mapped, preserved, and verified in Strapi so a customer with a saved document could still open it, unchanged, after the cutover.

Preserving SEO and Existing URLs

The site had years of search equity. Every existing URL had to keep working, every meta tag had to survive, and the new Next.js routing had to match the legacy structure exactly. Nothing dropped from search after launch.

Secure Cookie Authentication + CORS

Moving from a monolith to a headless architecture means auth crosses origins. We implemented secure cookie authentication across Strapi and Next.js, resolved every CORS edge case, and kept the session experience smooth for existing users.

Zero-Downtime Deployment

The site is live commerce. Any downtime is lost revenue and trust. We designed the cutover so the new stack came online without a maintenance window and without a single user losing access.

API Integration Across Systems

Strapi, the legacy Laravel endpoints during transition, and Next.js all had to talk to each other cleanly. We built a stable API integration layer that carried the platform through the migration and simplified after cutover.

WHAT WAS DELIVERED

A Modern Headless Platform the Client Team Fully Owns

360 Legal Forms went from a legacy Laravel monolith to a modern Strapi + Next.js headless platform in 6 to 8 weeks. Every migration promise was kept: zero data loss, zero downtime, zero developer dependency for routine content updates.

VISION DELIVERED
Modernization “Modernize the legacy Laravel platform” Strapi CMS + Next.js headless architecture, with reusable content models built for scale
Team Independence “A platform our team could manage without relying on developers” 100% of content editable through Strapi. Marketing and admin teams run the site end to end.
Content Migration “No impact on existing content” 270+ legal templates migrated from Laravel to Strapi with 100% content preserved and zero data loss
SEO & URLs “Improve performance and SEO” Every legacy URL preserved, Next.js SSG for speed, schema rebuilt for search visibility
Continuity “No disruption to users” Zero downtime during migration and deployment. No maintenance window, no rollbacks.
Scalability “Scalable and future-proof foundation” Reusable Strapi models, clean Next.js codebase, minimal technical debt for future feature work

WHAT TO EXPECT FROM US

Transparent Engineering and Predictable Delivery for Legacy Modernization

If you are modernizing a legacy platform and weighing engineering partners, here is what working with our team actually looks like.

A plan before a proposal.

We start with a working session to understand your legacy platform, your business constraints, and what independent control has to look like after handover. You leave with a migration plan, not a sales pitch.

A milestone review at every stage.

You review the actual work at each stage: audit findings, migration dry runs, staging cutovers, and final QA. You always know what has migrated cleanly and what is still moving. No month-long silences.

Migration-aware engineering.

A legacy modernization is not a green-field build. We treat data integrity, URL continuity, and downtime avoidance as first-class engineering constraints from day one, not as an afterthought at launch.

Experience with the hard parts.

Laravel-to-headless migrations, custom data transformation, secure cross-origin auth, and SEO preservation: we have shipped these into production. They are not research projects for us.

Quality that does not depend on one person.

Every migration script is tested. Every content model is reviewed. Every URL and cookie flow is verified in staging before a single byte moves in production. Nothing ships because one engineer said it looked fine.

Zero-downtime as a design goal.

Live commerce cannot afford maintenance windows. We design the cutover strategy from day one, not from the launch checklist, so your users never see a maintenance page.

You own what we build.

At handover you get the full platform: source code, migration scripts, Strapi content models, deployment configuration, and documentation. Your team can take it forward independently or keep us on; that is your choice.

A team-friendly working rhythm.

You are in every audit review, every migration test, every milestone conversation. You are not a ticket number to us; you are the platform’s first and most important user.

TECHNICAL NOTES

The Architecture and Tooling Powering the 360 Legal Forms Rebuild

Frontend Stack

Next.js powers the frontend, with static generation on marketing and template listing pages, server-side rendering on dynamic user surfaces, and clean routing that mirrors the legacy URL structure.

Backend / Headless CMS

Strapi CMS owns the content layer. Custom content types for legal templates, pages, articles, and services, plus roles and permissions built for the 360 Legal Forms marketing and admin teams.

Database

MySQL sits under Strapi as the persistence layer for all content and template data. Schema aligned to Strapi’s model so future content types deploy cleanly without downstream migrations.

Data Migration Pipeline

Custom Node.js transformation scripts read Laravel records, reshape them into Strapi’s structure, preserve relationships and metadata, and verify integrity on every record. Dry-run in staging before every cutover.

SEO Preservation

Every existing URL, canonical, and structured-data block was inventoried and rebuilt in Next.js. Metadata rendered per template, sitemap regenerated on content change, and search visibility preserved through the cutover.

Authentication & Cookies

Secure cookie authentication across Strapi and Next.js, with CORS configured for the cross-origin realities of a headless setup. Existing user sessions carried through the migration without a forced re-login.

API Integration

Strapi’s API layer wired into Next.js with response caching and typed contracts. During transition, Laravel endpoints were bridged cleanly so the migration could happen in phases without breaking the live site.

Deployment & CI/CD

Zero-downtime cutover strategy with staging parity, blue-green style deployment, and rollback ready. CI/CD pipelines set up for both Strapi and Next.js so the 360 Legal Forms team can ship changes safely after handover.

Modernizing a legacy platform? Book a 30-minute architecture call with our engineering lead. We will walk your stack, flag the likely migration and SEO risks, and sketch a delivery plan.

Book a call

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