If you were going to build a top-end law firm finance practice, one capable of transacting complex synthetic securities transactions, you would not – with all due respect to that redoubtable city – build it in Belfast.
Law firms have created outsourced centres in places like Belfast, Glasgow and Manchester to transact all sorts of day-to-day work because they can recruit reliable, decent-quality lawyers at a lower cost than in London.
But you would not do it with high-end finance because Belfast is not a ‘recruitment locus’ for high-end finance lawyers – they are nearly all in London.
So why do law firms think they can outsource other things where the primary recruitment locus is London, without affecting the quality of the output?
Take the creative professions – graphic design, copywriting, film-making – and many of the communications disciplines – journalism, social media, communications technology, even good old-fashioned PR. There are plenty of graphic designers out there, for instance, but fewer who can do digital animation and fewer still who are competent at creative film-making in a business context. While many people think they can write, the best creative copywriters and journalists stand out a mile.
The recruitment locus for all these people is, you guessed it, London. And not – with due respect to the valiant boroughs of Wimbledon, Bromley or Havering – outer London, but central London.
The Shoreditch effect
In that feverish place where technology meets design such as at the bleeding edge of web, social media and advertising, the industry epicentre is the erstwhile London Borough of Shoreditch, straddling the postcodes EC1 and E1. What was once a run-down hotch-potch of crumbling warehouses and council estates in the East End is now the capital’s development hotspot. ‘Buzzing’ scarcely does it justice – it is exploding with talent and opportunity.
Google knows this. Amazon knows this. Facebook knows this. That’s why all three companies are situating themselves in Shoreditch, along with thousands of others, multiplying the recruitment potential for bright young things interested in creative careers.
So if you are going to have an in-house design and comms team, take a guess where you are going to get the best people for it. And if you are going to use an external agency, guess where you are going to get the best outcomes?
There is no doubt that London is a more expensive solution but, as the old saying goes, you get what you pay for. Secretarial services in Leeds are no doubt every bit as good as they are in London because the skill – and it is a skill – is commonplace and spread fairly evenly across the country.
But the more specialist you get with anything, the more you need to seek out the key recruitment locus for the best results.
Articulate your culture
Now, you might think your firm’s brand is something of a sideshow – less important than, say, partner recruitment. If you do you are, I’m afraid, a complete idiot.
In a sector plagued by service confusion, where clients find it practically impossible to distinguish between dozens of providers all saying the same thing and charging the same – funny, that – successful branding is more, not less, important.
“You might think your firm’s brand is something of a sideshow. If you do you are, I’m afraid, a complete idiot”
It needs to be sensitive. It needs to be appropriate. It needs to blend history with forward thinking – it needs to articulate your culture better than you can. Every time rubber meets road – business cards, logo, brochures, website, social media, presentations, letterhead, office reception areas – it needs to leave the viewer/listener in no doubt about what you stand for and your ability to deliver it.
So next time your head of business services comes to you with a wizard wheeze to outsource your design team to Southampton, Hull or Newcastle (due respect etc) or decides to use an agency in Wellingborough, Bath or Carlisle (due etc) to cut costs, think carefully about whether you want your firm’s external expression handled by people outside their own industry’s centre of excellence.
Or is it just your finance lawyers you want to be excellent?
Many firms say they “want a brand” when of course they already have one. Brand is defined by the client market, not the firm. It certainly isn’t the logo and new stationary. It’s an encapsulation of why the firm resonates so well with their target audience. – hence “brand promise”. So a firm has to start from where it is, not where the comms agency’s brand-bank has a few unused ideas, regardless of where these creatives are huddled.
Having worked with some great design and comms professionals in Manchester and Leeds (as well as London), I find it hard to believe that all the talent is in Shoreditch. And indeed, a quick web search will find good work being done by the likes of: Union in Edinburgh and Leeds; Leith Agency in Edinburgh; Elm House Creative and Creative Zoo in Belfast; Creative Spark, BJL, Fabric, and TBWA in Manchester; and Rora Media and Frame in Glasgow.
The BBC has long sourced creative content from beyond London, and one of our most innovative games designers (Rockstar Games) is based in locations across the country. It is not a surprise to find real creative energy outside the capital.
1) I never said that brand was logo and stationery (etc). To dismiss it as such is to make the mistake many partners do (of course I know you better than that Jamie ;)). To deny that top creative goes into brand expression is simply flying in the face of reality. The idea that agencies are simply punting ideas from their “brand bank” (whatever that is…) betrays what I think is a slightly-mischievous misunderstanding of what branding agencies do, and is certainly NOT true for the people I work with, any more than top law firms simply crank a handle to print out off-the-shelf M&A or litigation strategy.
2) Nor did I say that all the creative talent is in London. I said that the ‘recruitment locus’ of the creative professions is in London, and particularly where all the elements come together. I don’t think that is in question, but some law firms act as if it is, not putting creative talent but cost at the top of their list, which was my main point. I don’t deny there are very good agencies outside London. I’m not from London originally myself, so I have no skin in that particular game, but to pretend that a city whose entire population would fit within two London boroughs (Manchester) could hold out an equivalent range of creative talent to the capital, as things stand, is fanciful.
Thank you for the clarification. I think I understand your argument better now. If so, the analogy you use may be flawed. The main reason why there are no high-end finance lawyers outside London is that their clients are all in the City and Canary Wharf. There is significant banking work in the regions, served by local lawyers, but it isn’t the kind of specialist work that is generated in London. The question is: is a law firm’s creative work the kind of thing that is only found in the capital?
I suspect it isn’t. Creative and design work feels to me a little more like tax or competition law advice. Sometimes it is ‘bet-the-business’ strategic, but sometimes it is the kind of thing that gets done alongside a larger piece of work. In either case, it is important, but I hope you would agree that Wolff Olins’ work for London 2012 is not in the same category as designing a firm’s response for a panel review, or developing new marketing collateral within existing brand guidelines.
Many regional firms have strong tax and competition law teams, some of whom compete at the highest level. Nonetheless, a FTSE 100 company needing European merger clearance would be well-advised to look to the greater experience offered by a small number of firms in London. Similarly, a law firm seeking help to develop a new visual identity would be best advised to look to London (whilst probably also keeping an eye on the talent available in the same places where it has its own offices) when selecting an agency to do that work.
When considering who should do the more ‘bread-and-butter’ work (to use a possibly pejorative description), whether that be creative support or competition/tax advice, it is more reasonable to take a commercial view — is it cost-effective to have this done from London, or would a regional choice be cheaper and meet the firm’s needs just as well? In the same way that even FTSE 100 businesses often choose regional competition or tax advisors for some matters, law firms would be wise to look across the country for the creative talent they need for internal design studios or for occasional agency assistance.
Your points are well made, Mark, but in the same way that many businesses are discovering that much of the legal advice they need is not bespoke at all, many (if not most) law firms don’t need top creative talent to nail down the basics. Indeed most of the brand people I know would despair when their request for the law firm client’s strategic documents – including the marketing one – would produce a lever arch file of business plans. I don’t believe that the limiting factor in law firm branding is the creative talent, regardless of the size of the recruiting pool available.
That is a very good point, Jamie, and it rather illustrates the status that branding and design work has within law firms (i.e. low). Quite whose fault that is – partners for being variously obdurate, out-of-date, superior, tight-fisted etc – or successions of marketing professionals who have failed to persuade or, worse still, attempted to replicate/implant techniques used in other sectors which do not suit legal, is anyone’s guess.
I think the task of moving branding and design up the agenda in law firms is made more difficult by the notion of using a much cheaper agency in the regions on the basis that it’s “just design”, and therefore isn’t going to make a commercial impact so get it done as cheaply as possible.
Some work we did recently for a big law firm client employed a rather novel, fully-integrated design solution, in particular using a detailed (and very stylish!) infographic to convey a very complex concept simply and easily. That graphic proved “inspirational”
That delighted me, not because we’d done a great job (this isn’t an ad for us!) but because it was an undeniable link between good design and cold, hard cash. Nobody is EVER going to admit (or even be conscious of) choosing a law firm because of their brochure, logotype etc etc. Of course not. But a consistent, integrated, stylish solution across every brand touchpoint (including, for instance, precedent docs and tone-of-voice concept/infusion) can influence, reassure and even surprise existing and potential clients. Every other industry has known this for decades and invests countless millions every year getting it right in infinitesimal detail – what makes law the exception? If anything, differentiation in law is MORE difficult!
If you want your brand expression to be the best – and I think EVERY firm should aim to be the best in class/its chosen field/at its price-point, otherwise why bother getting out of bed in the morning? – then you need to hire the best, and it’s amazing what can flow from that decision.
Oops, somehow that cut off in the middle of the third para. That should have read…
That graphic proved “inspirational” for one major client who saw it during a presentation, who instructed the firm as a result, looking to repurpose it for their clients (there were more than a dozen other new enquiries, all of whom obviously wanted the content/skill of the presenter but who commented favourably on the look-and-feel and presentation of information).
Mark I have to respectfully disagree with your premise that creative talent is based in Shoreditch. Last year our agency won a Gold at the Roses, and a commendation at the Transform awards Europe for work we have undertaken in the legal sector, no other agency has ever achieved this in the same year. We are in Liverpool. I worked for 15 years in London with some good and not so good creatives. There are some great agencies in London but we in the ‘provinces’ are holding our own too. The 10 Chambers and dozen law firms we work for would appear to disagree with you too. In fact 80% of our legal sector clients are about a square mile around Chancery Lane. Our company is wearejoandco.co.uk
…and some very nice work there too, Gary. If your clients choose you – as I’m sure they have – on creative grounds (picking up, I presume, a handy fillip on the fees side too), all to the good. And I’m sure there are some good agencies in Liverpool. And Belfast. And Manchester and Glasgow and on and on. But to pretend that the creative centre of gravity of the UK is not in London, to ask us to believe that the flashes of brilliance seen outside London are evidence of a different analysis is not credible. This is not a level playing field. As one cute little map I saw last week proves, you can fit every major City in Britain, in population terms, into London with room to spare. Manchester accounts for two boroughs. Liverpool another two, less populated ones.
I’m not saying always use London. I’m saying don’t reject London simply on the basis of costs, which all too many clients do because they do not value creative input highly enough. They outsource presuming that to do so is to buy an equivalent service at a much lower price. I don’t think that’s true for top-end law, and I don’t think it’s true for top-end much else either.
Yes, there are talented designers and animators and filmmakers and copywriters and on and on outside London, but London is the centre of creative gravity in the UK, and Shoreditch is the bubbling crucible. I have lived and worked here on the edge of the City of London for 15 years and it has transformed out of all recognition, beyond my wildest imaginings when I first moved here, and there are kids (and many of them are, alas) doing stuff I find difficult to get my head around.
There is, in short, a design ecosystem here that is unrivalled, I think in the world. That is going to, inevitably, produce some dross, some complacency, arrogance, laziness and all the other downsides of a mature, confident sector. But where it produces brilliance, it shines brighter than anything I have seen or experienced, and the sheer energy here is almost palpable. Admitting London is unique should not devalue the contribution Manchester, Liverpool et al make to the UK’s creative scene, but pretending otherwise is, I think, to do our industry a deep disservice.
Thanks for the compliments regarding our work- its massively appreciated. You raise without doubt some fair points. What I would say however is our clients work with us on the basis of the quality of our work not on our fees. We charge the same rates as I charged when working at London agencies and our client feedback tells us we are appointed on the basis of three criteria- 1) understanding of the legal sector 2) quality of creative work 3) our track record and relationship building. Its an interesting discussion nonetheless.
My aim is only ever to stimulate interesting discussion, so thank you in return!