Guest Post: Parker, ESG Ready and Cyturion: Why firms need to create a blue-print for how they name and brand their legal tech
Grahame Jones, branding consultant at Soukias Jones, has helped many different law firms to shape their brands. Here, he shares his insights into the emerging market of legal tech branding.
Remember the dot.com era? Overnight, new businesses emerged, using strange-sounding names and offering all manner of ‘get rich quick’ ideas. Pets.com, eToys, Kozmo.com, UrbanFetch and, of course, Lastminute.com. Most are now defunct, but the spirit of their branding lives on. Nowadays, we hardly blink at banking with Monzo or getting our electricity through Octopus. With the emergence of legal tech, exotic names have also found their way into the legal lexicon.
Traditionally firms had neither need nor desire to name new services with anything other than the corporate name. One name was easier to remember, for partners and clients alike. The corporate brand, leveraging associations and the firm’s reputation for legal expertise, was the obvious choice for naming new services or groups.
Then along came tech and changed the status quo
This spawned an ecosystem of tech products, innovation programmes and resourcing models within firms. From the relative luxury of having only one name to remember, partners and clients are now challenged daily to add to their ever-growing vocabulary of tech names: from the emotive (Lauri and Parker from Keoghs and Norton Rose Fulbright, respectively) to the descriptive (ESG Ready and Matter Explorer from Ashurst Advance and Allen & Overy) and the abstract (Cyturion and CC Dr@ft from Pinsent Mason and Clifford Chance). There are many others, and many more to come.
With clients calling for increased value for money, firms are responding by developing strategies to increase efficiency by creating a suite of online digital tools, hubs and labs, and using contract lawyering and legal centres. New tools and services need new names.
For firms, the dilemma is how to best organise this growth – and brand it. Most of these new developments originate from practice areas or sector groups, driven either by the needs of individual clients, or by market regulation. A bottom-up approach is fine for encouraging local innovation, but most firms don’t yet have a branding strategy that can help them to group, name and visualise their New Law services. A corporate identity manual to guide the use of Pantone colours is not the same as having comprehensive brand architecture guidelines.
Why is this important? Well, unless they take the process in hand, firms will end up with a plethora of disjointed names and identities. This makes it harder to achieve clarity, synergy or distinction. It also makes it harder for partners lacking tech savvy to understand what they are selling, and feel comfortable with this. Same goes for clients too.
But what is brand architecture, really?
Brand architecture enables a firm to define and communicate relationships between its different brands. It also shows how the corporate brand plays a part (if at all) in the marketing of products and services (see Diagram 1).This top-down approach shapes how a company communicates and markets its products, and affects the organisation of teams and the structure of budgets. Increasingly, as law and other professional services firms structure and market their tech solutions, they should deploy brand architecture (long used in large, multi-branded organisations such as FMCG businesses). Most aren’t yet doing so. If they don’t, as they add more and more products, they will find themselves in a mess.
There are three main models to help firms to organise their brands, as follows.
Monolithic: This is the default category for professional services firms, using the awareness and credibility of the main corporate brand (such as Hogan Lovells) to bundle a group of tech and resourcing solutions. A variant is for firms to draw on sub-branding to distinguish legal delivery from legal expertise (as with Ashurst Advance and BCLP Cubed).
Endorsed: In contrast to sub-branding, a separately endorsed brand becomes the hero. This has a distinct identity (visually and by name) and uses the master brand’s endorsement solely as a quality stamp (Konexo, for example, is a division of Eversheds Sutherland).
Branded: In this model, at the opposite end of the scale from the monolithic strategy, a standalone separate brand is established with little or no reference to the master brand or sub-brand. GravityStack is a good example. Owned by Reed Smith, it limits referencing the parent company. Since the brand is free of associations, the leadership team has the flex to position GravityStack (with its own name and visual identity) as it sees fit. Commonly, firms employ a mixture of models and approaches, and only rarely adopt a single solution when structuring corporate and product brands.
Don’t stop at the corporate brand
As a strategy, brand architecture doesn’t (or shouldn’t) stop at the corporate level. It can help to bring structure for organising and naming client-facing tech solutions – the Parker, ESG Ready and Cyturion online products of this world. When it comes to naming, a brand architecture strategy enables firms to make sensible and rational decisions by cutting through subjective suggestions and ill-thought-out, throwaway ideas for names. It also offers a framework for the discussion and analysis of naming scenarios. What’s more, it gives a structure for acquired products, or those produced in collaboration.
Another benefit that brand architecture offers is the opportunity to establish naming conventions. Types of names can include descriptive and abstract names, or those that use the firm’s initials or acronyms. It may be tempting (and even legitimate), for example, to adopt an abstract approach: creating a cool, fun, disrupter-sounding name seems like a sure way to express techno credentials. But this approach might not be the optimum route for longer-term success, for all products.
Brand architecture is useful for organising products. It’s inevitable that as tech develops, we’ll see the emergence of an increasing amount of products and product variants. Upfront discussions about how best to group products will only serve to enrich and shape solutions and market understanding. The example of Allen & Overy shows what occurs when this doesn’t happen, and products and services are created in isolation. A few years ago, the firm found itself with a portfolio of tech and resourcing solutions, developed over 10 years, which lacked organisation.
This made it difficult for its partners and clients to buy and sell; and so, in the absence of a brand architecture strategy, the firm developed a retrospective solution. Firstly, it packaged everything under an overarching proposition (Advanced Delivery), grouping all products into categories (Solutions, Technology or Resources). It then endorsed some solutions separately (Fuse and Peerpoint, by Allen & Overy). Because its journey did not start from a defined point, and there was no clear brand architecture, the firm risked losing sight of its destination.
Making the right decision
As tech and artificial intelligence solutions continue to challenge the status quo, the legal market is changing at pace. Firms now face market fragmentation, new breeds of competitors, and an ever-changing business environment.
Inevitably, more technology will spawn more products. From managing one brand, firms will need to make the transition to managing many.
To cope with these pressures and complexities, firms will need to find ways to manage and structure their portfolios of product brands more strategically and efficiently. A coherent brand structure can lead to impact, clarity, synergy and leverage. Having such a structure allows a firm to avoid market weakness, confusion, disagreement, waste and missed opportunities.
Remember, this is a journey. It is never too late to step back, review and rationalise your collection of brands, and develop a blueprint for the best way forward. The big consumer brands do it all the time.
Equally, if you are just starting out on the journey and planning to launch one tech product or service (and deciding whether to call this the same as your firm, or something different) you will need to think about brand architecture. No matter where in the journey you’ve reached, the development of a brand architecture strategy can help you to understand how to align with the market, develop clarity, and make sales.
Diagram 1 – Brand architecture model
Architecture provides framework for organising brands, making decisions on naming, identity and messaging.
If you would like to read more about the issues and trends in branding legal tech and innovation, download a free copy of our review: ‘Joining the Journey: How law firms branding their tech and innovation have progressed in 2020’ at www.soukiasjones.co.uk.