Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, one of the five ‘Magic Circle’ law firms, is desperate to really break in to the US market. All of them have been trying for years and none have really made much of an impact, especially compared to their success across the UK and Europe.
Deciding to give it another go, they went all in on hiring big-hitting (and expensive) staff to head up the US offering, determined this time to make a real splash. As part of this focus on the US market, they felt they needed a rebrand – in itself, a sensible choice. The decision to drop the German parts of the name to make it shorter (and change the way they’re informally referred to) and make it more ‘American’ sounding isn’t a bad idea. But from there it seems like all common sense rapidly left the room for a long lunch and didn’t come back.
The smart move would have then been updating the existing branding elements, such as the tweaking the colour palate, and refreshing the mark and typography – keeping all that brand awareness they’ve spent over 300 years building. (Granted it’s gone through a few name changes over that time.) Instead it was all unceremoniously thrown away.
In came a very dull and out of place wordmark, an odd serif brand font and a colour scheme with no real cohesion. It no longer looked like a prestigious law firm and instead, by getting rid of its quirks and heritage, it’s ended up looking very vanilla. Presumably this was the desire of Freshfields leadership: in order to try and crack the US they didn’t want to bring with them all, in their opinion, the baggage that was holding them back. And so far they’re being successful in their strategy of making an impact in the US, with both an increase in market share and fees, most probably down to the headline hires, but it could have been even more successful and a lot easier if they’d built on and developed their brand rather than burning it down and starting from scratch.
(As a side-note, there’s not a lot to be known about who did the rebrand, which would make me suspect that the client didn’t really listen to the expertise of the design agency they hired and that the agency wasn’t happy with the way it played out)
— Know your audience
