Thinking

What comes to mind when you think of a top law firm? Words like expensive, clever, sober, serious and tough, perhaps? Fun, exciting and cool? Never. When it comes to textures, there’s steel, glass and pinstriped cashmere. Feelings such as force, gravitas and will-to-power, accompanied by colours such as black, blue and grey. An aura? Singularly negative.

Feel like you’ve seen and heard it a million times? The truth is that ordinary branding agencies struggle with law firms. They are accustomed to branding products with distinct features, or services delivered by trained staff in a particular way, where aspects of the service become the differentiating factors. They are used to highly-consolidated markets, where four or five large players (or fewer) dominate a raft of ‘would-be’s, ‘has-been’s or ‘never-were’s. Law is not like that.

If you looked at the websites of a handful of top law firms, you could be forgiven for concluding they are all the same underneath. But any lawyer worth their salt knows in their bones that all law firms are not the same. Trouble is, they won’t be able to tell you precisely, exactly why. So they – and their hapless designers – end up mired in a swamp of ‘quality’ this and ‘commercial’ that, of corporate values that always tell of going ‘the extra mile’ for clients. Ever been a mile beyond the Finish Line in a race where everyone goes the extra mile? It’s called the Finish Line.

The constellation of factors that describes a law firm brand is a web of subtle interactions that those outside the profession struggle to understand. Instead, they try to label in their terms, try to reframe along the lines they understand, try to change law firms to things they can grasp. And they fail, routinely. This is not surprising. A law firm’s brand lives in every lawyer whose name sits on one of its cards. It lives in the triumphant negotiation, the headline-grabbing court win and the market-making team hire. And it lives in the grumpy email, the clumsy letter, the bad behaviour at the client event. The law firm brand can’t be easily pinned down or neatly summed-up. It is not a coat of paint or a new letterhead. It is not a brass plaque reflecting a glass lift.

Our approach to branding goes beyond mere colours and textures, beyond words and hollow statements of value created to try to conjure action from intention. At Overture, we like to talk about finding the unique amid the uniform. That means being brave, having faith and challenging. Sometimes it means walking away. Mostly, it means sticking around. Because a law firm brand is not ‘one-and-done’. With Overture, your only problem will be how you’re going to be the firm we’ve helped you discover. But unlike other agencies, we can help you with that bit too. Trust us, it’ll be a nice problem to have.