Ep. 26 - Is Your Branding Helping or Hurting Your Firm?

In this episode, I dive into one of the most common and most misunderstood questions I get from attorneys: Is your branding actually helping your firm, or is it quietly holding you back?

For centuries, lawyers were locked into stale, partner-name-only branding. Even after the ABA relaxed its rules, many states clung to tradition, forcing firms into long, forgettable names that carried more weight than meaning. But today, we finally have the freedom to build brands that are clear, memorable, and client-focused.

I break down how to create branding that connects everything from choosing names and taglines to picking colors and fonts that align with your ideal clients. I share the lessons I learned rebranding my own firm as The Patent Professor®, why cohesion matters across every platform, and why consistency beats flashy gimmicks every single time.

Whether you’re a solo practitioner or running a 50-100 attorney shop, this episode will show you how to build a brand that strengthens trust, attracts the right clients, and sets your firm up for long-term growth.

Tune in now and learn how to make your branding a powerful asset and not a liability.

Want to learn more about how our agency can help your law firm grow? Speak with John Rizvi ☎️

Transcript

The Law Firm Growth Professor 0:00

This is Pod Populi, podcast for the people.

John Rizvi 0:13

Hi, and welcome. I'm John Rizvi, the Law Firm Growth Professor. And for all you new listeners, I'm glad you're here. For those rejoining the show, it's great to have you back. In my podcast, I share the strategies for growth that have worked for me in growing my law firm from a startup with just me, a laptop, and a cell phone operating out of a spare bedroom to where we are today, a team of 60 professionals generating over 10 million a year in revenues from our 10,000 square foot headquarters in Coral Springs, Florida. Here, we're going to zero in on your law firm's branding. Branding is easily the topic I get the most questions about, and since the ABA relaxed its standards about branding, you would think that branded legal services would have skyrocketed. Unfortunately, that's not the case. But why? One problem is that in a lot of ways, we as attorneys are still carrying around the weight of the old traditional model of legal branding. Firm names like Blah, Snooze, Boring and Associates, PA were the standard for literally centuries. The main idea behind this kind of firm name was to clearly state who the founders and or the partners were. This, it was thought, reduced the likelihood of confusion among the legal community and the general public. You knew that you'd be dealing with one of these people or at least one of their associates. Over time, common practice became tradition. In some places, tradition fossilized into law, and the practice name convention turned into one true and only way to brand or market your firm. So now we come to another complication. The American Bar Association could relax its standards all it wanted, but without buy-in from the various state bars, that didn't matter. If you were licensed to practice in Florida and New York, for example, it wasn't until 2021 that you actually could brand using a trade name. You couldn't even think about rebranding your firm. Why? Because although Florida allowed it, the New York Bar Association's rules of conduct didn't recognize the ABA changes surrounding firm names and branding. The issue with this was it didn't allow much flexibility or creativity in branding your law firm's name. When you have no choice but to name your firm exclusively after its founders, partners, or founding partners, it really limits your options. And if you're licensed to practice law in multiple jurisdictions, you have to be very careful that what was okay in your home turf didn't get you in trouble in another state. So these holdout states had a disproportionate amount of control over how law firms branded themselves, and they weren't interested at all in changing. Thanks very much. Now, on one hand, it was thought that this practice leveled the playing field among the general public. Proponents of the old school naming structure claimed it helped make the legal industry more transparent. This may sound silly, but an article in Reuters by Jenna Green presented an argument by the founders of Law HQ considering the idea that the old naming scheme worked just fine. They said, and I quote from the article, nobody could claim that consumers would be better protected if trade names were prohibited in other industries. Imagine what that might look like on the open market. Meta or Facebook would be seen as less of an unstoppable force if the name of the company was Mark Zuckerberg and Associates. Now imagine if Apple was called Wozniak and Jobs. These are both examples that Law HQ posited, which is interesting because Law HQ actually sued nine state bar associations in 2020 over the right to use their trade name in states that didn't allow it under their own rules of conduct. This might sound like rank hypocrisy. If you only read that one sentence out of context, you'd think that they were shooting themselves and their argument in the foot, if not the head. But hold on for a second here, because they went on to say that law firms are no different. Now, if law firms are no different, what does that mean? That sounds like they're arguing against their own trade name here. Uh are they for it or against it? Well, as a lawsuit showed, they're for it. They could do business just fine in 41 states, but if they dared to cross state lines, operating as law HQ in the other nine, their attorneys could face fines, sanctions, or worse. And the states weren't interested in playing ball. This prevented them from expanding their operations into those states. So what Law HQ was really saying here was that it's okay for Apple or Facebook to use a trade name and a convenient verbal and visual shorthand for their products and services. But why is it not okay for attorneys to do the same? And that's what a brand is it's a convenient visual and verbal shorthand. Imagine trying to log into uh Mark Zuckerberg and Associates.com. That's a mouthful, especially for your fingers. But Facebook, hey, that's only eight letters versus twenty seven, not counting the dot com at the ends. Much more convenient. And look, it takes you exactly where you want it to go. It's not an accident that so many tech forward companies like short names or at least abbreviations, because shorter is better, especially in today's strangled attention span. Brands need to be short and memorable enough to stick in the brain. Now let's back this up just for a second. We as attorneys are used to dealing with uh other law firms, either as allies or opponents. We don't think anything of law firms with five or seven different names, but we likely don't refer to those firms by their full names. We adopt our own verbal shorthand for them. If I was dealing with a firm called Kissinger, Ingram, Staples, and Stiegler, LLP, I might expect a note from my secretary to the effect of that John Marks with Kissinger called about the Formagen case, and I'd know exactly who she was talking about. This doesn't make us more than the general public. I mean, yes, we have a deep education uh in the law, but I don't understand exactly how a toaster works any more than I understand the way my kidneys clean out my system. But if I think there's something wrong with my kidneys, I call my doctor. If my toaster doesn't make toast, I get another one. I don't need to understand how it works. I just need to know who to talk to or where to go to find someone that does understand. In the same way, the general public doesn't need to understand the law, just that there are people out there who studied hard to understand it, so the general public doesn't have to. So why do we stick with this hidebound, archaic way of naming our law firms, especially now when there's absolutely no need to lean into the old way? It doesn't make sense. Except when it does. If you are the partners of a firm that's doing business with thousands of clients in the US and abroad, you may not want to change your brand. After all, you've got a lot of goodwill and history backing that name. So it might not make sense for you to change it up. Some firms think this way and worry that a rebrand might rattle the confidence of their existing client base or make them think that something's up. And that's a fair and valid concern. Take a look at my prior firm, Fish and Eve, in 2001, when I left the law firm, they were the top intellectual property law firm in the country. And I've even gone so far as to say maybe one of the top three in the entire world. When you've got a client roster of inventors that includes Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford, and the Wright brothers in your history, you're a tough act to follow. People laughed at me when I told them that I was leaving. They gave me six months in South Florida before I came slinking back with my hat in my hand, begging for my old job back. And by their lights, they were absolutely right to do so. The firm had survived and endured over 120 years, and it had the weight of history on its side. Uh, or so I thought, in 2005, Fish and Neve was acquired by law firm Ropes and Gray and was folded into the takeover firm as the Fish and Neve IP Law Group of Ropes and Gray. That's a mouthful. Sure, at this time they were just playing by the naming and ethics rules in play. It made sense to play up and try to build on the goodwill and history inherent in Fish and Neve's name while still making it clear that Fish and Neve was no longer its own entity. But the rebrand turned out to be too much of a mouthful, and Ropes and Gray ended up cutting the Fish and Neve IP group branding loose in 2017. Today, Fish and Eve is just a footnote of, although a significant one in the history of intellectual property law. So how do you avoid the same thing happening to your law firm? Well, the good news is that all 50 states now allow some form of trade names to be used by attorneys and law firms to operate. While it's still a good idea to keep the conventional naming scheme, perhaps for official documentation, you can more or less do what you like with your branding, perhaps through slogans or taglines, provided that you don't do any of the following. First, you can't promise or guarantee results even by implication. Glenn Lerner, an associate in Las Vegas, Nevada, is one of the pioneers of this kind of branding. And a great example of this. It's a personal injury firm whose tagline is the heavy hitter. That branding doesn't make any promises, but it does say that the firm is going to fight hard for its clients, which is what you want in a personal injury firm. It does an excellent job of walking that fine line between saying what it will do and implying what it can do. Next, you can't have a brand that confuses people. You can't call your firm Apple Law, for example, slap the proprietary Apple logo on your letter head and expect that you won't get a cease and desist letter from Apple Computers. So unless your firm is actually a subsidiary arm of Apple Computers, uh that's different. But in this case, you'd be using the branding the company assigns you. And in that case, there's no issue. Your competitors may cry about it, but that's all they can do. Now you can call your firm Apple Law and choose a logo that looks completely different from Apple Computers. And there's no issue here. This might be a good choice if your partner's name spelled out the word Apple, for example, or if you focus on family or educational law fields. Lastly, your brand has to be cohesive across media. You can't call yourself one thing on TV, another thing on the internet, and another on the side of your building, and yet another on your letterhead. You've got to have one brand and be able and willing to go with it, no matter where you're presenting it. So how do we make sure that we're building a foundation for branding that's strong? How do we make sure that our branding is helping us and not hurting us? First, we need to think about our clients, not ourselves. When you brand a law firm, you need to keep the client's needs front and center in your planning and execution. I chose the patent professor for my branding for my law firm because it describes me and what I can offer my clients in a clear and direct way. I am an actual adjunct professor of patent law at Nova Law School, and I simplify complex areas of law for the students that I teach. I do the same for inventors that become clients of the firm. I have the credentials and experience in my practice area to back up calling my firm the patent professor, so there's no issue. Likewise, this needs to be your starting point. Think about your ideal clients and what they need and want. Then work on creating branding that tells them something about you and shows that you're thinking about them. This is the message, and it needs to be clear and obvious, even to someone who knows nothing at all about the law except what they've seen on TV. Next, you need to get into the details, font, color, design. Remember to consider your color psychology here. Just because your favorite color is maroon doesn't necessarily mean it's the perfect choice for your branding. Take into account how your website visitors are going to view your website. Now I know some of my long-term listeners have probably visited my website, the Patent Professor, and seen the colors that I use. My branding uses Candy Apple Red. The hex code for it is uh 952700. I chose this color for my website and the walls in my office and everything else that I could find uh uh that would hold still for five seconds because red imparts a sense of energy and urgency, both of which are important in the intellectual property space. For my law firm, it made sense. But it wouldn't make sense to use this, say, in a family law setting, where the idea is to lower the emotional temperature, not raise it. So if you so you've got to think about these things carefully. At this point, we need to think about deployment. In a perfect world, your signage, your web banners, your updated website, and new letterhead would all come out at the same time. Ideally, on the same day. You could even build up some hype for it by uh passing word around among your clients and people you've built a relationship with uh about when they should look for the rebrand to hit your channels. But we don't live in an ideal world. In 2019, I invested in a brand new sign for my uh Coral Springs office, which I had just bought. I was uh really excited for the signage to be installed because at that point I felt like the ownership of the building and the firm's identity would become official. There was just one tiny little problem. There's a hurricane warning for the Florida coast Southeast Florida coast. It ultimately took about three weeks to get our sign installed, but I still remember bursting with pride when the sign installer let me write up in the cherry picker uh to take a careful look and get photographs. The point here is not to plan for perfection. Build some flexibility into your brand uh and the development schedule. So if the sign can't go up on time or the letterhead order is delayed, or something completely goes off uh schedule, uh make that you won't damage your credibility with the new brand before it ever gets off the ground. Now, the final thing you need to do is make sure your new brand is spread as far and wide as you can manage. It should show up on your social media, your website, your letterhead, your signage, uh, right down to the business cards that you pass out and the coffee coasters you use in your office. It's crucial that you don't limit your brand exposure exclusively to cyberspace or the brick and mortar world. Remember, the idea here is to maximize brand cohesion and recognition so you thoroughly establish your brand identity in as many spaces as and minds as possible, and that you do this right from the start. That's how you build a brand that helps your firm and makes it stronger and more resilient. Sure, it's not going to save you from all uh fortunes, um, outrageous slings and arrows, but it can help you bounce off a little more easily over time. And remember, we're playing the long game here. We're not trying to become an overnight success or a legal juggernaut by next Tuesday. We're digging in for the long haul. And our brands are the things that can help save or sink us over time. Make sure your brand is taking you in the direction that you want to go. Before I wrap up this episode, I want to challenge you to consider the following questions. Relax, there's not going to be a quiz, and you're not being graded on your answers, but I feel like sharing them with the class, the comments are open and I'm listening, so it would help if you share. This is your opportunity for you to be brutally honest with yourself and really think about your branding in a different way. Is your branding uh positive? Is it moving in a positive direction? Or is your current branding holding you back? Why do you think that is? Uh is there a magic if I if you had a magic wand or a genie uh at your disposal, what elements of your brand could or would you change today? Right now, answering those questions might help change your trajectory. But uh finally, I want to thank you for tuning in today. Um, I hope you'll join me for the next episode when I drill down into a major branding problem that most people never really think of. If you enjoyed this episode, I hope you'll take a moment uh before you leave and share it with your friends and colleagues. Those who might like it also, click the subscribe button. And of course, I always appreciate likes because that tells me I'm giving you something of value that you can use. Once again, I'm John Risve, the Law Firm Growth Professor, and I'll see you at the next episode.

The Law Firm Growth Professor 18:53

So when a new idea pops into your brain, call the pack professor. That's my name. I'm a law school professor. An engineer too. I think math is fun. If the patent office says your idea is not new, that's just what they look, right? So when a new idea pops into your brain, call the patent professor. That's my name.