We’re currently working with a new legal outfit about to launch in the market, and they arrived with something genuinely unusual: a name we actually liked. In ten years of helping organisations in law think about how they present themselves to the world, that almost never happens.
It made us reflect on why naming is so hard — and why so many organisations get it so wrong.
The most common scenario we encounter is a firm that has grown, merged, or evolved beyond its original identity, but is still carrying a name that no longer does any useful heavy lifting. Founder names are the classic example. They can carry enormous weight when the founders are still at the desk, still winning clients, still the reason people walk through the door. But partnerships evolve, founders retire, and suddenly a firm finds itself defined by a name or names on the wall that mean nothing to a new generation of clients or people. Most new firms we work with avoid this for all the obvious reasons.
Then there’s the merger problem. The temptation to combine names, to honour both legacy brands and avoid the political fallout of choosing one over the other, almost always produces something weaker than either original. A portmanteau choice might feel like a fair compromise in the room, but out in the market it can feel like indecision.
The firms that get naming right tend to understand one thing: a name isn’t a label, it’s a signal. The best ones communicate something, a philosophy, a distinctiveness, an ambition, without trying to say everything all at once. The worst ones try to be descriptive, geographic and prestigious simultaneously, and end up being none of those things. And that’s before you even talk about trademarking and asset classes.
What struck us about our new client was that they had already done that thinking before they came to us. They knew what they wanted to stand for, they knew who they were trying to attract, and the name reflected that. It made everything else easier.
Most firms never get to have that moment of clarity. In a profession built on continuity and trust, that’s a difficult conversation to have internally, let alone with clients.
But here’s what we’ve found when we’ve worked with existing organisations on naming. What clients are attached to is the experience, the relationships, the quality of the work. A well-handled rebrand, with the right narrative behind it, rarely costs a firm the things it fears losing the most.
The firms that get this right tend to have done the hard thinking firstwith our help. We base it on who they are, who they’re for, and what they want to be known for. The name is just the proof of that work. Which is probably why, when it’s right, you know it immediately.