Quick change

You never get anything done in the legal market without encountering a bit of sniping and Herbert Smith Freehills’ rebrand is no exception. Some say they can’t look at the firm’s new logo without thinking of grim reality show Big Brother.

But the team behind the firm’s new image insists that Herbert Smith Freehills now has something few other law firms can lay claim to - a brand that means something.

“It’s hard to say something different in the legal market because you have a lot of similar firms out there,” says Jason Frank, managing director at design and communications agency SAS, which handled the rebrand. “It came down to Herbert Smith Freehills being smart people who were working on high-value projects and getting their clients through ever more risky global economies. They are proactive and cut to the heart of a matter. It was important that this came through in the visual element of the brand, so the logo is informed by that organ of human perception - the eye.”

Parker and Frank would not comment on how much the project cost Herbert Smith Freehills, or how much they usually charge for similar work, save to say that it was not a seven-figure sum.

Normally, the company would have a year to do a rebrand - including a website and graduate recruitment material, but in this case they had just four months to get the bulk of the work done and approved.

Given the timescale law firm management usually operates on, that’s nothing to be sniped at.