.cards-sec — 9 layout options

What is wrong with the layout today, stated plainly. This is the section where the current site leaks the most, and none of it is about prettiness:

1. The excerpts are centred. Centred multi-line body copy forces the eye to hunt for the start of every line. Headings can be centred; three-line paragraphs should not be.
2. There is no metadata at all — no date, no practice area, no author. A visitor cannot tell whether an article is from 2014 or last month, or whether it is about the thing they came here for.
3. Nothing states that a card is clickable and there is no link to the archive. 427 articles exist and the homepage offers no door to them.
4. Three items, flat hierarchy, ~700px of page. No item leads; the newest and the oldest look identical.
5. The images carry no information (a stock photo of crops heads an estate-dispute article) while taking the most space in each card.

Every option below fixes some subset of those. Which subset is the actual decision.

This also settles the open question from the badge round: the section header does not need to become a link. A "View all articles" control gives the archive a proper door without turning a heading into a control — so the badge can stay decoration, as picked.

Placeholder data: dates, read times and practice-area tags shown below are invented to demonstrate the layout — real values come from the posts. Article titles and images are the real ones from the live homepage.