Just been wandering around the site of Access Legal, Shoosmiths’ ‘post-LSA brand’, according to Legal Week. Access Legal (which I shall call AL, as Paul Simon almost said) is a big plastic pot into which the Shoosters are chucking all their volume business. Conveyancing, personal injury, medical negligence – the kind of itty-bitty ambulance chasery that clogs up an otherwise perfectly decent episode of Countdown.
As a bellwether for ‘Tesco Law’, what does AL teach us? Largely, that brand-building is harder than it looks, especially if you don’t edit your copy proficiently.
It’s not rubbish – but it’s not as fluent as it might be, and it’s a little careless in its language. Think of an adolescent girl trying to sound positive with a hangover, and you’re pretty well there.
Evidence? Slightly grotty run-on sentences such as,’We all need a lawyer at some point in our lives, explore this site to find out more.’ Carping on about the AL values without really telling us what those values are. Claiming that ‘one thing we never do is use jargon’. (Really? Isn’t a grasp of esoteric jargon one of the things I’ll be paying you for?) Telling us that they have a ‘genuine absence of any sort of hierarchy’ and then letting slip that job roles include Case Handler, Senior Case Handler, Team Leader, Legal Executive, Solicitor, Associate, Partner and Director. Repeated capitalisation of the word ‘Will’. Painful sentences like:
So you can find out more about that process if you want to, our free legal information helpline and online resource will fill in the background, so you can see the full picture and have a clear understanding.
At one stage AL tells us, ‘After all, this is the 21st century we’re in’, a sentence which in my estimation has about nine words too many.
Trouble is, it grates after a while. And the brand definition isn’t strong enough to make the lapses forgivable. You worry for AL slightly because it’s all very generic, not occupying any meaningful space in the brand landscape.
What will become of it, I wonder, when it needs to stand its ground in face of savvier Tesco Law practitioners, such as, um, Tesco?
