The Firm Identity

Let’s get gritty about this: lawyers are all about control.

Wording in a contract or statement for a court has to be precise, watertight if you like, and our experience is that lawyers tend to apply this same level of control and precision to many other areas of life.

The most frustrating thing about a brand is that only its inception and its ongoing visual and literal expression are under your control. Its impact – the vital bit of it after all – and the evolution of its perception in the mind of your target audience are entirely out of your control.

You have no control over what people are going to think of you, and less still over what they will tell others. With the growth of ‘social’ media (Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Twitter etc), a bad message – or a good one – can spread like wildfire.

Much money, time and energy is spent by organisations trying to control an errant brand expression, usually with little or no effect, unless one golden rule is observed: whatever you do, it must, must, MUST (we repeat because this is NOT optional – you simply MUST do this) be done with AUTHENTICITY.

You must be Authentically You. Only then is there a chance that your brand messages be received, transmitted and reflected properly.

Let’s take a concrete example. Suppose you are a firm which has a culture which requires long hours of its associates, which gives a lot of autonomy to partners and, being brutally honest, probably lets partners get away with a little too much. You have the odd bully in the midst, who is at best a maverick and at worst an HR nightmare, but they bill a lot and you’re therefore disinclined to deal harshly with, or eject, the offender. That laxness sets a bar for other partners who know they can take liberties with their associates. As a result, you have to pay more to ensure good retention and tend to recruit tough, ambitious and sometimes hard-bitten associates as a result, some of whom are distressingly vocal about the pressure-cooker work environment. Everyone internally knows it’s a tough-assed place to work, but the pay is good and the quality of work is excellent, so they stomach it.

The firm may be, in pockets, as cuddly and collegiate as in your fondest imaginings, but the worst examples of errant behaviour will spread virally throughout the market via peers of your associates or, these days, on wikis and social networking sites.

Given that, any messages you send into the market pretending to be something you’re not will actually be counter-productive. In addition to being tough, you’ll be seen as disingenuous, deluded and untrustworthy.

If you’re determined to continue to allow your environment to be like that, you have to find an expression of that which is authentic, in order to recruit to that image. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a high turnover rate of associates and a difficulty in attracting candidates in the first place.

With apologies to Ronseal, who came up with one of the finest advertising campaigns of all time, the best advice to law firms is to come up with a version of ‘does exactly what it says on the tin’.

The advantage with Authenticity is that you are simply being You, and that should be effortless. Further, the more you do it, the better you get at it, and the better the chances that the ‘right’ messages will lodge where they need to in the market.

If you’re getting it wrong, or not quite right, currently, don’t worry; you’re not alone. In fact, we struggle to think of anyone who’s getting it quite right.

This is not surprising. Your audience is a particularly difficult one to appeal to.

Point one, they are not only highly-educated, they are super-educated. Not only do they not respond well to being told what to think, they actively oppose it, as if being influenced by something as crude as branding both denies their intellectual independence and somehow talks down to them. It is a point of principle NOT to be influenced, and in fact to make their own minds up, by individual research and experience.

Secondly, they are part of a uniquely interconnected peer group. If they do not actually know someone at your firm, which is very likely, they will know someone who knows someone. They can easily get to what they see as the Truth, despite your best efforts.

Put simply you have absolutely no control over the message you are sending out once it is outside your front door and to think you do or to be upset because you thought you might is simply absurd.

All you have control over is the message that you are sending out, both internally and externally. You have control over what your brand looks like, your stated brand values and all the printed material. You have control over what goes out in press releases and partial control over what goes out via interviews with the press. That is all.

Making peace with this fact is the first step in embracing what it truly means to manage a brand. Surrendering to a Higher Power – the untameable, wildness of the market – is the First Step on the road to better law firm branding.