Sacha Pfeiffer, (a helluva a name there) reports on law firm names in today’s Boston Globe.
“A growing number of law firms nationwide are shrinking their lengthy rosters of stodgy-sounding surnames to names that are quicker, livelier, and help establish an identity. That means experimenting with unorthodox slashes and hyphens rather than traditional ”ands” and ampersands. It can mean eliminating commas and, as with WilmerHale, spaces. Above all, it means reducing the partner names on a shingle to a select few, and sometimes only one.
Fueled by a heated scramble for top clients, renaming is one of a litany of sophisticated marketing techniques long common in the corporate world but only recently embraced by the legal industry.
”The general rule is that law firms are dropping names and shortening them to become like corporate brand names, like Coca-Cola,” said Stephen Barrett, a law firm marketing consultant. ”Everybody wants to have a nice, clean, crisp, contemporary name instead of one that sounds like it was designed out of copper plate type fonts in 1877, which might be great if your only practice is old, Yankee, WASPy money, but for every other purpose only tells the world that you’re behind the times.”
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