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Andrew Glincher is a managing partner with the law firm of Nixon Peabody. He spoke to the Washington Post about rebranding the law firm to the public.
“I was looking at the [American Lawyer] 100 list of the largest firms, pretending to be a client,” said Glincher. “It occurred to me if you’re a general counsel looking at all these firms, they look very much alike, except how many attorneys they had and their profits. And clients don’t really care about how much lawyers make. If law firms, like other businesses, could aspire to be different. . .that could be a game-changer.”
The firm employs some 170 attorneys and staff members in Washington. It decided to hire the brand strategy firm of Wolff Olins, which is based in New York and London to create a new brand for the firm. Wolff Olins has created branding campaigns for Adidas, Spotify and Sony. The goal of Nixon Peabody was to create a brand that made the firm seem more approachable than the normal large law firm.
The firm’s website was completely remade and it looks more like a design company’s website than that of a law firm. The biographies for the lawyers are written in first person and they answer the question, “What do you see on the horizon?”
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“We looked at some of our old stuff and thought, ‘Who understands this?’ ” Glincher said. “It could be on Jay Leno headlines. It didn’t make any sense, it was all written in legalese. An average business person reading it would be scratching their heads. We tried to write it in plain straightforward language so that anyone in the business world could look at it and say, ‘I get what this means.’ ”
According to Glincher, the changes to the firm’s website and brand are due in large part to the recession that hit in 2008 and forced the firm to cut back on its legal spending.
“If business kept booming, would we change our ways? Maybe not,” Glincher said. “The slowing demand in the industry forced our business and our industry to be more like every other business. . .it had to think about how it was going to be different and how it was going to act going forward.”
Glincher said that one of the goals of the rebranding for Nixon Peabody is to have the clients feel more like business partners with the firm instead of a place to seek legal advice.
“We need expertise in areas where our clients work, and we need to do this on our own dime,” Glincher said. “We need to be predictive of the future, and essentially be looking around the corner to help our clients do business better.”
Nixon Peabody employs more than 600 attorneys across the globe, with headquarters in Boston. There are quite a few job openings for attorneys at the firm, so be sure to visit LawCrossing today to browse the available positions with Nixon Peabody.
