Si Griffiths, via Wikimedia Commons

Editor's Note: This story is adapted from ALM's Mid-Market Report. For more business of law coverage exclusively geared toward midsize firms, sign up for a free trial subscription to ALM's new weekly newsletter, The Mid-Market Report.

Rebranding at Swift, Currie, McGhee & Hiers might appear to have been a simple proposition—yielding a new logo—but the process, just recently completed, took a year.

A variety of voices, vendor hires, potentially wounded egos, and a lot of time—all of those are elements in the rebranding formula. At no two firms is the process identical. But several commonalities tie them together: the process must be deliberate, and the firm must emerge with a clear message.

Swift Currie, a 145-lawyer litigation firm based in Atlanta, last changed its logo 15 years ago, when the firm unveiled a logo that dropped “McGhee & Hiers” from its public image (though not its formal name.) The logo unveiled in September 2018 is far different, with the two names marked in lower-case cursive, divided by a gold slash. It will be on everything with the firm name—from business cards to golf shirts.

The change was developed by two outside companies and a firmwide committee of about 20 people, said managing partner Terry Brantley and business development director Michele Golivesky.

“We got our share” of initial concerns, Brantley said, noting that many lawyers tend to disagree with any form of change.

“It's a new look, but the same client service,” Golivesky, who was marketing director during the 2003 rebrand, said.

She and Brantley said the change was based in part on interviews with clients, outside lawyers, and lawyers and staff within the firm, which has doubled in size since the 2003 rebranding effort. The interviews, they explained, revealed that the firm was known for lawyers who were approachable, with whom clients can talk about anything.

The firm created “connections beyond 'just a client,'” said Brantley, hence the informal look of the logo.

For Norris McLaughlin—Norris, McLaughlin & Marcus until earlier this year—rebranding seems not to have been a cumbersome process, but due diligence was necessary.

“While we didn't need a consultant for the name change, we did hire a design firm to guide us with such things as our new color scheme, logo design, etc.,” said John Vanarthos, managing partner of the Bridgewater, New Jersey-based midsize firm, in an email. Clients were not asked for input up front, but have given positive feedback since the rebranding launched earlier this year, he noted.

“The process of changing the name was to follow the industry trend of shortening names,” Vanarthos said, noting that firm leaders originally wanted to go with “Norris Law,” but “found it was too common in the marketplace, [and] as such there was very limited availability for website/domain names, etc.”

When it comes to rebranding, ”Everything is on the table,” said Ross Fishman of Chicago-based Fishman Marketing, who works with law firms. “They look at all of the elements. These include the message to the marketplace.”

The mindset for launching a rebrand, according to Fishman, ranges from “time for a new logo” to “time for an entirely new message.”

Norris McLaughlin's Vanarthos said most law firms “are referred to by the first and/or first and second names of the firm name, and since we're already commonly called Norris McLaughlin, it was easy to make that decision in one management committee meeting.”

According to Fishman, that's the right line of thinking.

“The threshold question is, what are people already calling you?” Fishman said. “The reality is, your marketplace is already calling you this. Let's agree with them. Let's simply reflect the marketplace.”

Two names, or even one name, usually suffices to identify a law firm in conversation—perhaps three names in a rare case, Fishman said, noting Am Law 200 firm Frost Brown Todd. And thus only those few names belong on the firm's logo, he said.

Fishman also pointed to his work with New Orleans-based midsize firm Galloway, Johnson, Tompkins, Burr & Smith, whose website and logo were reworked to emphasize the “Galloway” name.

The first part of the process—the “intake,” as Fishman called it—involves hour-long interviews with partners or major stakeholders, rather than group meetings, in which people are rarely candid, he said. Often midsize and smaller firms “have a style they can't even quite define themselves,” but they have a strong sense of the firm's tradition and identity, so these interviews go a long way to driving the rebrand, Fishman said.

Drafting visuals and graphics can take a few weeks, but the entire creative process can be done in a month's time, he said.

The creative part of the process need not be drawn out. But at Galloway Johnson—whose logo and brand previously featured an acronym of the name partners, “GJTBS”—getting buy-in from those name partners was a considerable part of the process, according to firm managing partner Jason Waguespack.

The idea and creative concept to rebrand came largely from firm partner Timothy Hassinger, and was raised at partner meetings. But the idea didn't get an especially warm reception from the name partners—of whom most were nearing retirement, while one was already deceased.

“When the concept was first brought up, I think all of them had a cautious if not negative reaction to it,” Waguespack said. But after a meeting with those partners and Fishman, who made a presentation and explained the rebranding objective, as well as the importance of brevity and clarity, they assented to the change, which the other partners readily approved by vote, according to Waguespack.

“The most important thing was stressing that we were not changing the firm's name, that the only thing we were really changing was our brand,” Waguespack said.

Names on a law firm logo can be a touchy issue, sure, but then there's the matter of the ampersand.

In eras past, “lawyers loved their ampersands with a fiery passion,” Fishman said. “No one outside of law even knows what an ampersand is.”

The beloved ampersand was a casualty of the 2018 rebranding at Hartford, Connecticut-based Halloran Sage, the Connecticut Law Tribune, a Mid-Market Report affiliate, reported earlier this year.

“It was a very deliberate process,” Chief Operating Officer David Urbanik said in the report. “The rebranding happened last month, but the process leading up to it was a year-and-a-half long.” 

That process resulted in a new website, along with a short-format video.

“We took time to survey our employees and survey our clients,” Urbanik said. “We spent time sharing ideas internally to be sure what we thought were the values and what was driving us was shared universally—literally everyone in the firm shared in that process. We wanted to make sure that the brand really reflected who we are.”

A sense of who the clients are, not just who the lawyers are, is an equally vital part of the process, it seems.

Hirschler Fleischer, an 80-lawyer firm based in Virginia, recently rebranded in order to make the name more memorable in the Northern Virginia market, into which the firm expanded in 2016. But the question of name recognition spurred a more intensive exploration into how the firm viewed itself and how people outside viewed it, according to Courtney Paulk, president of the firm's board of directors.

Paulk said the key revelation was that while lawyers in the firm saw themselves as litigators or transactional lawyers, “clients don't see us that way.” Instead, she said, clients were more interested in what lawyers knew about their respective industries.

The effort eventually led the firm to hire outside vendors to redevelop the firm's website from “just looking good” to telling the firm's story about how well it knows its clients and their businesses.

Paulk said firms contemplating a rebrand should go through a period of introspection and then choose their vendors carefully.

“Clients want to know you understand that industry,” she said.

Jonathan Ringel and Michael Marciano contributed to this report.