The problem.
Florida law firms working personal-injury, malpractice, and litigation cases need the same thing on a regular basis: a board-certified medical expert who can review the file, give an honest opinion, and — when it matters — show up for a deposition or trial.
The existing options were rough. Word-of-mouth networks were slow and inconsistent. National expert directories were enormous, expensive, and dumped firms into a sea of profiles with no real curation. There was no in-between: nothing that felt like a personal concierge but operated at the speed of modern litigation.
Cortex was founded to be that in-between. The brief I got was deceptively simple: "We want law firms to feel like they're getting a hand-picked expert in 48 hours, not searching through a database for a week."
The approach.
Most freelancers in this situation would have reached for a WordPress theme or a Webflow template, slapped a contact form on it, and called it a website. That would have missed the point. Cortex didn't need a brochure — it needed a platform.
I made three core decisions early:
- Custom-coded site over a template, because the brand needed to feel as careful as the service. Templates have a tell, and law firms can smell it.
- Supabase for the data layer, because it gave Cortex a real-time database, auth, and file storage in one place — built for solo developers who need to ship fast without sacrificing power.
- Design that signaled both authority and warmth. Most legal-adjacent sites swing too far into one or the other. We pulled them together with a dark navy + warm gold palette, an editorial serif headline, and a sample expert profile right on the home page so visitors instantly understood the product.
The stack
- Custom HTML, CSS & JavaScript — fully bespoke front end, no theme or page builder
- Supabase — Postgres database, auth, file storage, real-time
- Resend — transactional emails for intake notifications
- Netlify — hosting, edge functions, and continuous deploys
What got built.
The public site is the easy half. The interesting work is what's underneath: an expert directory backed by Supabase, with sample profiles, availability flags, board-certification status, and a structured intake flow that routes incoming case requests to the right experts based on specialty.
From the visitor side, the journey is calm and short — read the value prop, see one credible sample expert (Dr. J. Martinez · Neurosurgery · 4.9 rating · 48h response), then either request an expert match or browse "For Firms" and "For Doctors" tracks. From the admin side, intake hits the database, the team can review, and matching becomes a workflow rather than a chase.
That's the part of this build that taught me the most. The same brief I got — "we need a website" — is the same brief every small business gives. But the businesses that actually grow are the ones whose websites do something: capture leads cleanly, qualify them automatically, route them to the right human at the right moment. The website isn't the product. The system is.
The result.
Cortex is live, the platform is operational, and the brand reads as premium from the first scroll. More importantly, the foundation is built for what comes next — expert payments, member portals, AI-assisted matching — without having to rebuild the site from scratch.
What this taught me.
Cortex is the project that defined my studio's offer. The line between "designer" and "developer" doesn't make sense for most small businesses — they need both, from one person who can hold the whole picture. That's what Smart Sites at Rosada Builds is now built around: beautiful sites with the data, AI, and admin tools that make them actual businesses, not just brochures.
If you're a small business that wants more than a pretty homepage — if you want the system underneath — I'd love to talk.