Trust Guss Wins Best Website at 2025 Golden Gavel Awards

Part of the National Trial Lawyers Association, each year at the Trial Lawyers Summit in Miami the Golden Gavel Awards banquet recognizes marketing excellence in the legal industry.

Unlike many website and marketing awards, the Golden Gavel winners aren’t determined by a panel of judges. The general public are surveyed and asked a simple question: “Which of these law firms would you hire?” It’s a true test of marketing. Whoever the public says, wins.

For 2025, in the category of Best Website Design, one of the five finalists was America’s largest injury law firm, Morgan & Morgan. But when all the names were read, the winner was Trust Guss and its new attorneyguss.com website.

Launched in September 2024, the new website for the Trust Guss brand marked the culmination of more than a year of discussions, months of media production, and hundreds of hours of discovery, design, and development work. More importantly, it represented the next step forward for a 25-year legal brand in one of the country’s most competitive legal markets: Houston, Texas.

Now, one year since launch, the results are in: year-over-year case sign-ups are up 52 percent compared to the same quarter last year.

Having represented more than 45,000 clients over 25 years, Stewart Guss is a well-known name in personal injury law. Based in Houston, one of the nation’s most competitive legal markets, the Trust Guss brand is visible across the city, from billboards and TV ads to its role as the official law firm sponsor of University of Houston athletics. The firm also has offices in Dallas, San Antonio, and Katy, Texas, as well as Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, and California.

For many years, the firm thrived on bottom-funnel digital marketing, particularly SEO. But over time, its website ballooned to more than 1,100 pages. The offline brand evolved faster than the online presence, and the Trust Guss team recognized it was time to reset their digital approach. After multiple strategy discussions, in the spring of 2024 the firm hired Studio 3.

The first responsibility in working with a brand with as much history and equity as Trust Guss is understanding why it’s been so successful. The firm’s guiding principle has always been “Client First.” It’s written in the footer of every email the firm sends. If you look closely, it’s evident in the firm’s processes, how it treats people, and its thousands of client reviews.

In a Houston market where legal “hammer” ads were born and lawyer billboards line every freeway, the credit goes to Stewart Guss for instructing Studio 3 that he wanted something completely different and for providing the creative room to explore possibilities.

Building from the Trust Guss brand, the creative strategy for reconceiving the firm’s website centered around two words: people and trust.

Studio 3’s Chief Creative Officer, Andres Cuero, envisioned a website design that many lawyers might reject or be reticent about. There wasn’t a lawyer in the main stage. The website led with the firm’s clients and carried this concept throughout the design. To propose it, Andres employed AI to generate a prototype. The Trust Guss team gave the green light. Then the real work began.

A team of six Studio 3 staff traveled to Houston and across four locations filmed the content necessary to materialize the vision. Hurricane Bethyl wasn’t expected. On the first day, the van that the S3 Media shoot team rented flooded. Digital Marketing Manager, Rachel Fielding, waded through knee-high water. The air conditioning at the Trust Guss offices crashed. Everything went wrong, except the shoot. Every item on the shot list was captured.

While it wasn’t part of the original scope, a new 60-second video was created for the main stage of the Trust Guss website. The firm loved it so much it was converted into 30- and 60-second commercial spots. It started running the same month the new website launched, and a year later it’s still a mainstay on CTV and broadcast TV.

Being validated as the best in anything is nice. But ultimately, marketing and websites are commercial activities. The true test of excellence is in the results they achieve.

Over the first year, the new Trust Guss website gained 2.4x more traffic. Search rankings for “personal injury lawyer Houston” rose from page five to the top five on page one. Most importantly, on a quarterly basis, case sign-ups rose 71 percent quarter-over-quarter after one year. Compared to the year prior, the increase was 52 percent.

The new Trust Guss website was a true collaborative effort between the firm’s marketing team and Studio 3. From the Trust Guss team, Matt Bonilla, Madisen Scott, and Dulce Lietzau played key roles. On the Studio 3 side, Chief Creative Officer, Andres Cuero, personally designed the website. He was supported by Jessie Flores (Art Director), Davan Firinn (Media Producer), Marcus Meisler (Photographer), Aaron Soto (Content Director), Rachel Fielding (Digital Marketing Manager), John Marcus (Web Developer), Katie Gunter (Assistant Web Developer) and Sydney Perry (Creative Project Manager).

And of course, the visionary and builder of the brand who brought Trust Guss and Studio 3 together: Stewart himself.

Congratulations to one and all on winning Best Website Design in the legal industry!