Branding for Legal Departments What, When, and How?

Published in International In-house Counsel Journal, Vol. 15, No. 61, Autumn 2022, 1

Many legal departments do branding exercises once in a while. It often consists of a workshop (or a series of workshops) to define the department’s identity, mission, vision, and values; or a panel with colleagues from the business to discuss mutual expectations and what it means to be a (strategic) business partner; or deliberations and plans on how to gain ‘more visibility’ and become involved upstream in the project management process; or efforts to standardise the layout of the documents issued by the members of the law department; or a mix of the above.

These initiatives, however, sometimes fail to deliver the expected results (assuming specific results had been defined and were expected, which is not always the case). Yet branding, when done correctly, can lead to valuable long-term outcomes for legal departments and the organisations they belong to.  To make the most of their branding efforts, however, leaders of legal departments should have a good understanding of what branding is, when to engage in it (or not), and how to do it successfully.

What is branding?

The word ‘branding’ derives from the Old Norse brandr which means ‘to burn’.  It refers to the ancient farmers’ practice of marking their cattle with a burning iron to show ownership: the mark burned into the cattle's skin made them stand out from other livestock.

Today, ‘branding’ still refers to putting a mark on something to show ownership or origin, as when you sign an email or a memo or add your organisation’s logo on a presentation. 

When in-house counsel talk about branding the legal department, they sometimes refer to this. They wish to create a visual identity for the department or the products issued by it: presentations, contracts, templates, memos, etc. In this case, branding means designing a logo for the legal department, laying out a standard template for agreements, creating a distinctive signature for emails, etc.

But the meaning of the word ‘branding’ has evolved beyond this basic level. For today’s marketing professionals, it designates the process of creating and maintaining a strong, positive perception of an organisation and its products in the customer's mind.

Each part of this definition requires careful attention and translates into fundamental questions for anyone considering a branding initiative:

·       What do you want to brand? According to the definition above, the ‘branding objects’ (the things you want to brand) can be either an organisation, its products, or both. How does that resonate with your plans for the legal department? Do you intend to brand the organisation (i.e., the legal department as such), a part of it (a regional team, a centre of excellence, your legal academy, etc.), a service or a product  (a new contract template, a policy, a compliance training program, etc.)? Effective branding starts with a precise definition of your branding object.

·       Who is your target audience? Who are your ‘customers’? Who precisely are the people that should have a strong, positive perception of the legal department or its products? Do you target the business’ senior management, operational managers, the members of the legal department themselves, legal talents who could join your department, or others? Do you intend to target them all simultaneously? As much as it matters to define your branding object, it is critical to be clear about your target audience.

·       What is the strong, positive perception you want to create? What do you wish your audience to feel and think about your legal department or the product you want to promote? For example, many branding campaigns by legal departments aim at being perceived as business partners, as we will discuss later.

The above definition of branding reminds us that it is a process: it requires a continuous series of actions. Indeed, branding is as much about maintaining and reinforcing positive perceptions in the long term as about creating them in the first place. Limiting branding to a one-off event such as a global legal conference where participants share their ideas and aspirations and officially declare a common ambition is only a first step. Even if the event was fun and energising, if nothing happens afterwards, it may, in hindsight, remain a happy memory but, at the same time, be seen as a missed opportunity and a waste of time.

When to brand?

As we have just seen, branding is a long-term effort. Most in-house counsel already have a heavy workload. Should they add branding on top of it? Isn’t their job description already full enough? Is it indispensable to invest extra time, effort, and sometimes money into branding?

Branding should never be a goal in itself. It is a means to an end and should not be initiated without a good reason. Engaging in branding only makes sense if you have identified a problem, understood the root causes of it, defined an objective, and determined that it is the best way to achieve that objective or at least that it contributes to it.

Some in-house counsel do not need branding at all. They are recognised as good lawyers by their colleagues; they have been around for a long time; everybody knows and respects them; they participate in strategic decision-making, and the collaboration with their colleagues is mutually satisfactory. Why would they bother with branding themselves more? In practice, they already have a strong brand (even if it is not formalised). They have nothing to gain from extra branding efforts.

When is branding the solution?

Sometimes, the legal department faces organisational problems, but lawyers erroneously believe it can be solved by branding.

A legal department was complaining that the business was not involving them early on in projects. They were only consulted for a last-minute, urgent legal check. They wanted the business to change that habit and involve them more upstream. To achieve that, they believed they had to brand themselves and be recognised as business partners. However, a deeper analysis of the situation showed that multiple factors were at play: limited interest from top management in legal issues, corporate governance procedures biased in favour of financial and operational criteria, pressure on the business to meet stretching sales targets, lack of resources within the legal team resulting in delayed response time, etc. It became apparent that launching a business partner branding campaign would utterly miss the mark and fail at addressing the underlying problems.

On the contrary, branding can be precisely what a legal department needs. For example, a legal department had worked extensively on a marketing policy laying out what can and cannot be done in this area. However, all this valuable work would have been wasted if the marketing managers expected to comply with the policy were not aware of nor interested in it. Therefore, a branding campaign was essential to promote the new policy amongst them.

The power of strategic branding

In other words, branding must be strategic. It must come as a solution to a problem that has been adequately diagnosed and contribute to an objective that is clear and precise (instead of blurry and vague) and worth the effort.

The odds of successful branding are higher when the ultimate purpose is mutually beneficial. Let’s consider a legal department that launches a branding campaign to promote a new automation tool that enables business managers to manage NDAs independently. It is suitable for business managers because they can get a draft immediately with just a few clicks (they don’t have to wait until someone in the legal department is available). It is suitable for in-house lawyers because they no longer have to spend time on the tedious processing of NDAs. In that case, it makes sense to go full gear into branding that tool.

Conversely, the goal and expected benefits are sometimes obscure. For example, when the legal department meets for a big conference to discuss the team’s “identity”, what exactly is at stake? The team will eventually produce a few slides outlining their identity, vision, mission, and values, but then what?

Lawyer-centric branding

If we scratch behind the surface, we discover that many branding efforts by legal departments are not targeting the business, but the members of the legal department themselves. The real purpose is to strengthen the lawyers’ self-image. In many companies, in-house legal counsel feel they do not get the visibility and recognition they deserve and dislike the ‘support function’ category they officially belong to. Declaring (to themselves) that they are ‘business partners’ is a way to restore their self-worth and elevate their status in their own eyes. Their business colleagues do not care whether they call themselves business partners, legal advisors, legal managers, international counsel, or anything else. Still, for the lawyers, it can make a big difference.

Boosting pride and self-worth is a legitimate, healthy and sometimes necessary endeavour. It is good for the morale of the lawyers and for the legal department: lawyers with a positive self-image are more likely to feel motivated, engage in their work, and stay in their jobs.

However, confusion may arise when this purpose is disguised behind a branding effort allegedly targeting the business. The campaign's promoters must be aware of the target group they are really aiming at and not fool themselves or anyone else into believing they are targeting another.

Branding the ‘legal family’

Another frequent goal of branding exercises in legal departments is to forge a feeling of unity and belonging among the lawyers. In large companies with multiple regional offices and business units, the legal department members are spread all over the world with little contact with each other. They feel more connected to their colleagues in the business unit they advise than to the other members of the legal department they hardly know. In such a context, the goal of the branding exercise launched by the group general counsel may be to strengthen the feeling of a shared identity (we all belong to the ‘legal family’).

However, we should ask ourselves: so what? Who benefits from this shared feeling of belonging? Who suffers from its absence? To whom does it matter? A legal team in Singapore may be working very effectively with the business in that region, while the same goes for the EMEA legal team. They hardly work together and have very few interactions, but so what? Would the business be better served if they would? Would they be happier, more engaged in their work or more effective? Not necessarily.

Sometimes, the real motive behind branding the group of lawyers as a united, coherent team is to give substance to the job of the group general counsel. If the legal work across the group is effectively accomplished by local units working independently, what’s the need for and the added value of a group general counsel? But if there is a large team to be managed, then the role of group general counsel becomes indispensable. For that reason, well-functioning, autonomous local units are sometimes pushed in the direction of forming a big, united group, an integrated department, to provide the group general counsel with a department to manage. The benefits are clear for the general counsel (there is a large group of lawyers to manage), but what are the benefits for them? And if there isn’t any, why would they care?

This is not to say that all branding efforts focusing on creating team spirit and connectivity among in-house counsel are in vain. There might be real advantages to the members of the legal department to feel more united and work more closely: they may learn from each other, share best practices, help out each other when needed, broaden their intellectual and social horizons, promote consistent policies across the business, avoid duplicating work already done by others, etc. Branding the ‘legal family’ makes sense when those potential benefits are desirable and achievable.

Branding for the sake of branding

The ‘why?’ and ‘what for?’ questions should be asked systematically before launching a branding effort. The response must be compelling because there are many other valuable things to do. For example, imagine a legal department where different legal teams (serving different regions or business units) use different templates, different fonts in their document, different colours on their slides, etc. Nobody has ever complained about this. Enters a new general counsel. She considers this ‘lack of consistency’ to be unacceptable. She believes it does not send out a professional image of the legal department.  And she launches an extensive, time-consuming effort to standardise everything in the name of “consistency”.

However, this is unnecessary and even counter-productive for two reasons. First, nobody except her perceives this lack of consistency. The business colleagues working with the legal team in the US may get their advice in a different format than their colleagues in Europe, but they don’t even know, and they couldn’t care less if they knew. It only irritates the group general counsel. But besides allowing her to feel she is reigning over a unified kingdom, beyond achieving consistency for the sake of consistency, there is no business case for investing time in standardising everything. These are misplaced branding efforts. There are most likely more pressing priorities.

All these considerations point in the same direction: legal departments should think twice before engaging in branding. Effective branding requires long-term efforts and commitment, and a decision to brand anything should not be taken lightly. A good test: what if you don’t do it? What are the likely consequences, and how severe are they? Who might complain, lose, suffer, or be in danger? And how much does it matter if they do?

How to brand?

If you have reached this part of the article, you are probably convinced that you should go ahead with your branding project. The next question is how to do it effectively and successfully.

There is no single procedure to brand the legal department or its products. As we have seen above, branding depends on what you want to brand, to whom, and why. Prescribing alleged best practices applicable to all situations or an A-to-Z procedure would be misleading. There are, however, a few tips and tricks that may be a source of inspiration.

Give it a name

Branding starts with giving a name. Unnamed items are unrecognisable commodities. The name should stand out and be meaningful. It should be simple, short, and sound nice to make it easy to remember. Rebranding anything often starts with giving a new name to it or at least giving a new life to an old name.

Think of all the products provided by your legal departments: contracts, templates, tools, training programs, team meetings, conferences, etc. Do they have a name? Are these names a bit original, engaging, and even inspiring? Is their meaning straightforward and are they easy to remember? For example, if you want to brand a new policy, don’t name it “Policy LEG-2-22-BL-V1-001”. Call it “Conflicts of Interests Policy” or even better, “Why and How to Avoid Conflicts of Interests”.

What’s the name of the legal department? What are the job titles of the lawyers? Are you legal advisors, business partners, legal managers, legal experts, risk managers, compliance and ethics officers? What message does each of these possible job titles send to their bearer (and possibly to the external world, although it may not care much about the issue)?

Make it simple and nice

Too many things produced by lawyers are repulsive to non-lawyers. Who, besides lawyers (and even then) likes to read a contract? Who enjoys reading a lengthy legal memo? Stuff produced by lawyers is often perceived by others as too long, tedious, complicated, etc. Whether you want to brand your department as a whole or a particular initiative or product, it can only work if the client’s experience of it is positive. A policy drafted by the legal department or a training session organised by it should not be dull: it should be interesting, pleasant, and insightful. Design matters. Good communications matter. Soft skills matter.

How much do you make the members of your legal department aware of their responsibility in creating a positive ‘user experience’ for their clients? Do you allocate time and resources for them to learn and practice the required skills? Do you organise training on writing skills, presentation skills, legal design, and process design?

A legal department was trying to promote an anti-trust policy across the business. The document had been drafted by a law firm. It started with a long series of cross-referencing definitions, contained lots of dry rules but no examples nor stories to illustrate them, and only text and no graphics. The odds that the business colleagues would read this document through to the end were close to zero. So, the legal department decided to do things differently. The document was entirely redrafted. It is now structured around critical questions of immediate interest to the readers, illustrated with graphs, testimonials, examples and stories, complemented with dos and don’ts and practical recommendations, and laid out professionally.

Keep it to a few words

Explaining what your brand is about should take at most one sentence. If you need several slides or a 20-minute speech to explain your brand concept, you are wasting everybody’s time. You need to trim down your message to the bone.

A legal department was struggling with the challenge of explaining internally and externally its dual mission of, on the one hand, helping as solution-oriented business partners their business colleagues achieve their goals and, on the other hand, setting limits and protecting the company against legal risks, which may entail ‘saying no’. Instead of a long speech describing these conflicting roles and the need to perform them simultaneously, they crafted a simple, powerful three-word definition of what they were aiming to deliver and which became their brand: ‘compliant business solutions’.

Describe the value your provide

The message at the core of branding should be the key benefit your target audience will get from you or your product. It is a promise of value. Branding communications should be audience-centric. In the example above, ‘compliant business solutions’ describes precisely what the business may expect from the legal department.

Branding by the legal department may be less effective or even completely irrelevant if it is self-centred because the business does not care much about the legal department’s ‘identity’.

Suppose the target group of your branding campaign is the legal department itself and its members. In that case, communicating about the team’s identity is both self-centred and customer-centred (both groups are the same) and thus OK. But if you want to brand the legal department among your business colleagues, it is prudent to assume that they care about what you can do for them, not how you perceive your own identity.

Ultimately, defining your brand means determining the value you deliver to others. Branding yourself as a “business partner” does not clearly articulate the benefit for the business. Branding yourself as a provider of “compliant business solutions” is more effective because “compliant business solutions” is closer to what the business wants than “business partner”.

Use the power of metaphors

Using a metaphor to describe your brand allows you to link it to positive features already encapsulated in the metaphorical object. For example, if you brand the legal department as a ‘family’, you automatically associate features such as closeness, caring for each other, solidarity and mutual support, and belonging to your department without a need to spell them out.

To find out relevant metaphors for your department, why not do a brainstorming exercise with your colleagues to generate answers to the following questions: if we were an animal, which one would we be (a lion, a horse, an eagle, etc.) and why? What if we were a car (Volvo? Tesla? Ferrari? Mercedes Benz?)? What if we were an occupation (fireman, general practitioner, brain surgeon, psychologist, fitness coach, police, special forces, insurance broker?), an artist, a book, a sport, a room or another part (door, roof, basement, …) of the house, an app (Waze, Google, …), etc.?

Repeat it. Repeat it. Repeat it.

Branding is a continuous process. Brands that are not actively maintained fade away. The message at the core of your brand must be repeated again and again. Organising a communication campaign around the launch of a new code of conduct may create positive buzz about it for a while, but after some time people think less about it and eventually forget it. Morevoer, new recruits are hired and never hear of the code of conduct. Yet this is the trap into which many legal departments fall. To avoid this, it is necessary to define a long-term communication plan for any branding initiative the legal department takes. For example, a legal department was reviewing the way it was managing policies. Besides drafting them in a much more appealing way, it was decided that no policy would be adopted unless it was accompanied by a long-term communication plan.

Set up branding KPIs

If you decide to spend time, energy and resources on branding, you should have a way to measure the effectiveness of your efforts. But what exactly should you measure? You want to determine the strength of your brand. You could, for example, assess it before a branding campaign, and then again after it to determine the campaign's impact. The strength of a brand depends on three parameters: awareness, associations, and actions:

·       ‘Awareness’ refers to the knowledge of the brand among the target audience. Suppose everyone in the company knows that there is a legal department, or that there is a policy issued by the legal department on a particular topic, or that there is a template available for a specific type of contract. In that case, you may say that awareness of these branding objects is high.  You could easily measure this with a survey asking colleagues whether they are aware of the existence of these branding objects.

·       ‘Associations’ refers to the feelings and opinions experienced by the target audience in relation to the branding object and associated to it in their minds. What do people think of the legal department, the legal advice they receive, the training programs they follow, and the templates they should use? How do they feel about it? This is subjective, and you can only measure it by asking.

·       ‘Action’ refers to the behaviours induced by the brand. A brand is powerful if it leads people to do certain things (such as picking a specific soda can from the shelve despite its higher price). For example, the intention behind building a strong brand for a training program should be to trigger people to register and attend it. Action-specific performance indicators may include the number of downloads of a standard document, the registration figures to an online webinar, the number of requests to the legal department about a particular topic, etc.

Conclusion: a case study

Let’s conclude with a successful and inspiring branding story.

In this company, the general counsel had reached retirement age. A new general counsel was hired from outside. She was shocked by what she perceived as old-dated working methods resulting in poor performance. Her team, however, were used to the situation and did not see any problems nor feel any desire to change. Nevertheless, she was determined to shake up the department.

She started with a branding survey both within and outside the legal department. The same questions were asked to the lawyers (how do they perceive themselves) and to the internal clients. Both groups were asked to assess the department’s performance on a scale from 0 to 10 in the following areas: responsiveness, punctuality, clarity of communication, understanding of business issues, providing helpful,  practical, solution-oriented and actionable advice, project management, care and diligence, trustworthiness, and assertiveness.

These criteria were the desired ‘brand attributes’ that the general counsel wanted to nurture. This is how she wanted the legal department to be perceived, both by its members and by its internal clients.

The feedback from the internal clients showed mediocre satisfaction with most of the criteria. From their point of view, there was much room for improvement. On the contrary, the lawyers' self-assessment revealed a high degree of self-satisfaction.

The first challenge for the new general counsel was to convince her colleagues that their performance could and should improve. Doing this without losing them required tact and diplomacy.

When that idea was finally more or less accepted, she launched a series of internal training programs to sharpen soft skills (advisory skills, risk management for lawyers, written communication, etc.) and workshops to collaboratively design better operating procedures (internal meetings, work allocation, knowledge sharing, project management, client relationship management). This infused the entire department with a new sense of excitement and purpose, and they were all eager to apply this newly acquired knowledge to their day-to-day work.

A year later, the same questions were asked again to the internal clients and this time, the survey showed a big jump in their satisfaction level in all the areas. The legal department’s brand had substantially improved. Its perception by the business colleagues was way more positive and stronger than a year before. When the news was shared with the legal department’s staff, their pride and morale jumped as well, and their self-image improved dramatically. Their brand had also improved in their own eyes.

This story shows that, for a legal department, branding is very much about substance, not just about appearances. Formulating an inspiring mission statement and choosing a vivid colour palette is one step, but relentlessly creating value in day-to-day operations and interactions is the ultimate secret to inspiring lawyers’ brands.