The Mourant Brand Refresh Story

There was a time when law firms didn’t have to worry about branding. That was a dark art best left to the premium car marques, with their glossy magazine ads and aspirational clips of motors gliding around mountain roads. But these days, with the legal field becoming increasingly competitive, you have to get your message across – not only to clients, but to the best talent in the world too.

In 2016, having been through a major evolution in the previous decade, we realised that a refresh of the Mourant brand, would ensure that we continued to truly reflect the outstanding qualities of the business as it is today.

Branding can, however, be a subtle business – especially in a field like law, where many companies offer what may appear to be similar services. And therefore you have to be able to make it very clear what makes you ‘you’. 

Refreshing a brand is a serious process. A new logo and snappier name mean nothing if they’re not backed by genuine substance. The concept of a brand has to offer a central organising principle, not a mere tag line. It should possess meaning and consequences, and help guide internal behaviours as well as external communications.

Gaining insight

Working with Principia Brand Consultants, we dug deep in this process. A wide programme of qualitative research, through conversations and follow-up questions, was just the beginning. Internally, the initial phase of research alone involved 31 interviews with partners and our people. We also interviewed 27 clients and intermediaries and ran three focus groups and an online survey of over 200 employees. This gave us an unparalleled depth of insight – we knew how these people saw the global situation, and the future; how they viewed what Mourant was doing and what kind of people they liked working with.

Armed with all that information, we set about connecting the dots and quickly learned what made our company special in the eyes of our clients. First, they really valued our seamlessness. As a company, we’re able to weave together our work with a diverse range of clients across a host of different legal systems and time zones – from Hong Kong to New York and London.

Then there’s our commercial judgment, the ability to share our technical expertise in a way that's pragmatic and pertinent to our time-pressed clients – “Here’s the law; here’s what it means to you in practice; and here’s what you should do about it.”

Finally, there was our approach to partnerships. In an industry that’s become far more transactional, relationships often become sidelined. It turns out our clients appreciated that Mourant, as an all-equity partnership, doesn’t start the clock running every time we pick up the phone. Instead we’re proud to offer our clients a genuine, lasting commitment.

A global perspective

This deeper approach to research undeniably helped us see our own strengths more clearly. But, as so often happens with such self-examination, it also brought up other questions. We realised we needed to identify the one thing that would help us stand out from the chasing pack.

One thing stood out more than anything else – our global perspective.

Imagine you’re forming a private-equity fund of $1bn, seeking to raise money to invest in a biofuel plant, in a rapidly changing economic and political environment. As we have a presence in BVI, the Cayman Islands, Guernsey, Jersey, Hong Kong and London, clients know that we understand the world from a host of perspectives – that we see the differences between Asian and US clients, for example, and that we know where the flows of capital are going.

We can take the client’s ideas and suggest alternatives, going via Hong Kong for certain advantages, or pointing out how we’ve seen many of our Canadian clients tackling the same problem. There’s only one way to achieve that – you have to look beyond the rush of the day-to-day, and instil a culture of curiosity, connectedness, and being open to the world, seeing things through a global lens.

Having identified what made us unique in the eyes of our clients and those within the firm, we set about the real business – taking the abstract concept of global perspective and turning it into a brand.

Team spirit

Our first step was to establish clarity. In a firm like ours, where so many partners have a stake, you can’t have everyone poring over every font or logo decision. So we created a steering group comprising partners from all over the world, who worked together across time zones to build a considered, coherent approach that was ready to present to the partnership. 

Of course, it’s in the nuts and bolts of refreshing a brand where things get really interesting. Some steps were very straightforward, such as creating a shortened 'umbrella' name. Mourant Ozannes can be unfamiliar words that can be complicated to spell and pronounce – especially for a prospective client in, say, Hong Kong or the US. Creating the umbrella name, Mourant, was a simple choice, with powerful potential.  Mourant Ozannes continues to live on in the law firm practices but our simplified umbrella name will allow us to cut through where we have ambition to grow our business.

Then we worked on the identity, colours and logo to galvanise these efforts and give the changes momentum. While it’s crucial to avoid simply changing branding without any substance behind it, the opposite is equally true – you can change a lot of the substance only for no one to notice, because there was no splash.

We chose a red as a visual differentiator in our market and picked an elegant, sophisticated and premium, yet still vibrant colour – and a typeface that reflected our personality just as well. After a long creative process, we went for ‘mourant’ in all lower case, which is quite unusual. The lower-case ‘m’ is more elegant and approachable than the upper case, yet it doesn't look aggressively informal, which would have been inappropriate.

Our global perspective is represented in a new emblem, a decorative and modern graphic device to link business cards and websites; and in our photography. We invested in high quality, impactful and interesting imagery that shows well-known landmarks, such as the ‘Gherkin’ in London, from unique and interesting perspectives. All images are black-and-white, with a particular style of framing and cropping, to establish continuity across our materials.

Finishing touches

The final piece of the puzzle was the creation of a brand-new voice and tone for all our communications. It’s easy for law firms to slip into complex language that can make them sound like robots and alienate the people they’re writing for. We wanted to be sure we were communicating in an open, inclusive and informative way. After a number of workshops, we established our key editorial principles – that all our content is authentic, clear, confident, definitive and expert. This reflects exactly who we are.

If all of this seems like an incredibly detailed and meticulous process, it was. Yet none of it would mean anything without working on the most important element – people. We’re a 600-strong firm, and we realised the importance of bringing everyone on board. We have invested time in creating a network of brand champions – people on the ground who could be clued into the decisions that had been made, and the thinking behind it, in order to spread the word among those who’d naturally have questions about it all.

And, to tie everything together, we launched the ‘Mourant Way’, a unifying behavioural principle that shows everyone – from a junior lawyer to the finance team and our Governance Services colleagues – how to support the key messages in the practical things they do every day. By following the Mourant Way, we’re able to show clients that what’s written on the website aren’t mere words. They’re reflected in our actions too.

And so, we now find ourselves well on our journey to embedding our refreshed brand in everything we do with new imagery, branding, logo and colours that reflect our seamlessness, our commercial judgment, our technical expertise and our commitment to genuinely partnering with our clients. Our global perspective gives us a lens through which to direct our time, energy and thinking. And the Mourant Way provides a set of principles that guides our client relationships, as well as acting as a calling card to new talented individuals who join us, making it very clear that they can build a future here.