Pro Features

Premium Skins

March 23, 2026 docsadmin 4 min read

Premium Skins are the headline feature of Legal Pro. A skin layers over the free theme’s base styles to deliver an entirely different visual identity — different palette, different typography, different mood — without breaking your content, customizer settings, or template structure.

Activate Pro and you immediately get access to the bundled skins. New skins arrive with each Pro release, all included in your existing license.

Editorial (default)

This is the bone-canvas, oxblood-accent, Fraunces-headlines look the free theme ships with. It’s the baseline, and it’s already considered Pro-quality typography for serious legal practice.

Chambers — Ink & Gold

The showcase skin. Deep ink canvas (almost-black, warm), gold leaf spine, Playfair Display headlines, Source Sans body. Built for senior counsel and white-shoe firms — reads like a leather-bound brief in evening light.

Use Chambers when:

  • Your firm operates at the upper end of the market
  • Your hero pull-quote and testimony block carry real weight (the dark canvas dramatizes them)
  • Your brand is established enough that “we don’t need to shout” is a coherent message

Don’t use Chambers if your practice serves a more accessible market — civil-disputes mid-market, consumer-protection, employment for individuals. The dark canvas reads as exclusive in a way that may misalign your brand with your client base.

How to activate a skin

  1. Make sure Legal Pro is installed and your license is active.
  2. Go to Appearance → Customize → Legal Pro → Premium Skins.
  3. Use the Active Skin dropdown to choose between Editorial and Chambers (and any future skins).
  4. Click Publish.

The site immediately repaints with the new skin. Refresh any front-end tab and you’ll see the new palette and typography.

How skins work technically

Each skin is a folder under wp-content/plugins/legal-pro/skins/ containing three files:

  • skin.json — metadata (name, description, fonts URL, version)
  • style.css — the skin’s CSS (typically 300–500 lines)
  • screenshot.png — 600×450 preview thumbnail shown in the Customizer

When you activate a skin, the plugin enqueues that skin’s style.css after the theme’s base styles, and (if the skin specifies its own font URL) replaces the Google Fonts URL via the legal_fonts_url filter.

Skins override CSS variables in :root — palette tokens, font tokens, shadow tokens — and then patch a small number of specific components whose feel changes more drastically than a variable swap can express.

Switching back to the free theme look

Set Active Skin to Editorial (Default). This is the bundled built-in option that ships with the free theme — selecting it disables all premium skins.

You don’t lose any settings or content. Skins are presentation-only.

The site reverts to the free theme’s Editorial baseline. Your customizer values, content, and skin selection are preserved — the moment you reactivate Pro, the previously-selected skin returns.

Building your own skin

The skin folder structure is deliberately simple. If you have a developer on staff or an agency, building a custom skin for your firm is realistic.

  1. Create a folder wp-content/plugins/legal-pro/skins/your-slug/.
  2. Drop in skin.json, style.css, and screenshot.png.

Example skin.json:

{
    "name": "Mychambers — Custom",
    "description": "Our firm's branded skin.",
    "version": "1.0.0",
    "author": "Your Firm",
    "fonts": "family=Cormorant+Garamond:ital,wght@0,400;0,600;1,400&family=Inter:wght@400;500;600&display=swap",
    "pro": true
}

The plugin auto-discovers the folder via the lgpro_register_skins filter — no code changes needed. Your skin appears in the Customizer dropdown alongside the bundled ones.

For a starter, copy chambers/style.css and modify. The CSS variables it overrides are documented in Adding Custom CSS.

Note: skins added to the plugins folder are wiped when Legal Pro auto-updates. For permanent custom skins, register them from a child theme or a small mu-plugin instead.

Roadmap

The skin system is actively developed. Skins planned for upcoming releases:

  • Mid-Market — softer palette (warm gray + sage), Inter throughout, less editorial gravitas. For consumer-facing practices.
  • Boutique — minimalist, single-accent, Crimson Pro. For solo practitioners and small chambers.
  • Tribunal — formal courtroom palette (charcoal + brass), serif-heavy. For litigation-focused firms.

All future skins are included in your existing license at no additional cost.

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