When social media changed the rules of defamation law, Schillings repositioned itself as a reputation defence firm. Brittany Golob explores the new strategy and rebrand

Professional services firms are facing a somewhat bleak future. Thousands of graduates seek entry into the legal field each year. The established law firms monopolise new business, while the entire sector struggles to keep its collective head afloat.

Three years ago, boutique libel, defamation and reputation law specialist Schillings, already aware of its rapidly disappearing grasp on a niche market, foresaw an even more acute diminishing of differentiation within the sector in the future. With its business plan set to turn over in 2012, strategic decisions had to be made and those decisions would undoubtedly have a huge impact on the future of the firm.

The legal profession had also changed through the introduction of Alternative Business Structures (ABS). The main culprit behind the ‘Tesco law’ phenomenon, ABS also allow law firms “The ability to diversify the range of legal services provided by the practice either through: becoming a ‘one stop shop’, or consolidating a specialism in a particular area of the market,” according to the Law Society.

The actual factors contributing to risk and reputation management had changed since the explosion of social media and digital technology. Defamation, in days past, occurred when a newspaper decried a celebrity in print. Teams of lawyers would then argue a libel case in front of a judge or jury. Reputation is not that simple anymore.

Christopher Mills, Schillings’ COO says the firm had four options: "We could have diversified into other law and become like any other law firm; we could've opened up overseas; we could've stayed as we are and done nothing. But we knew that market was shrinking and becoming more competitive. We decided to go forward with our core competence: reputation."

Schillings has worked in reputation, in various ways, since its inception 30 years ago. That used to entail defence against libel and defamation in courts of law. The new remit has expanded to focus on reputation in three different areas, with the specialist expertise of the law firm providing the support framework.

With the new year looming, Schillings’ leadership team began to determine the firm’s strategy for the next three years. The ABS allowed the team to explore options beyond simple case law. When it decided to focus on the threats to reputation, not the legal defence of reputation, the road ahead became clear. First, Schillings would maintain its existing offer of legal expertise and family law services, but it also needed to refocus on reputation and risk management, third, it would incorporate IT security into its stable of services in order to address the factors contributing to risk.

Mills says the firm sought to bring together these different services “To create a new way of looking at reputation. Law is absolutely powerful, but the problem needed more than law as a solution. Law can only go so far.”

That was the first part of a three tier plan for Schillings: restrategy, restructure, rebrand. The second step, restructuring, was largely an internal process of bringing new people with experience in consulting and cybersecurity into the firm. The entire 50-strong firm was included in the plans from the beginning. Employees were kept apprised of changes and consulted on the firm’s direction. This gave them a sense of ownership over the project, Mills says.

With the internal machinery beginning to churn, Schillings embarked on stage three: rebrand. The firm compiled a list of top design agencies from among its own references and the successful agencies at the 2012 Transform Awards. When pitching, Goosebumps blew away the competition in terms of understanding what Schillings was attempting to do strategically, Mills says.

“The challenge was very much ‘How can we reposition our business?’ It was a fundamental repositioning into a new category that is ill defined. We needed the brand to have a transformational effect,” Goosebumps owner Simon Cotterrell says.

Cotterrell delineates the disintegration of the libel law specialty, signaled by footballer Ryan Giggs, a Schillings client, getting caught in an affair scandal which was publicised on Twitter. Trying to ensure privacy in the modern world was no longer possible using law alone. “And overnight, the rules of reputation law changed,” Cotterrell says.

Schillings, thus, had to change too. Goosebumps and Schillings worked for months before determining how to articulate the firm’s new positioning before alighting on the phrase “Law at the speed of reputation.” Cotterrell says the slogan encompasses Schillings’ new position in the market, “Reputation is changing so quickly. The escalation of an issue into a threat to reputation and to business happens so very fast. You need a company with the power of a lawyer, but with the nimbleness of a communications company to handle that level of threat.”

If becoming a ‘reputation defence’ firm is something of a break from tradition for a professional services organisation, the ensuing rebrand was no different. Cotterrell says, “Suddenly, you’ve taken a world of ambiguity and dark science and made it very simple so that everyone understands. In doing so you can take ownership of it. This is a new category. Early adopters need to do the Apple thing and go into it with total clarity and confidence.”

Launched on 2 September, the branding Goosebumps and Schillings created over the course of only a few months addresses the repositioning head on. It is designed to, as Cotterrell says, carve out and allow Schillings to take ownership of its new space.

The wordmark is comprised of ‘Schillings’ etched in a bold, slightly distressed all-caps typeface enclosed between two brackets. Law firms often err on the side of finesse and typically, even when rebranding, use a more script-like typeface. By choosing a strong, almost military-esque wordmark, Schillings immediately presents its new ethos to the world.

The previous identity was, according to Mills, professional but stark. “When you look at this now, this is bold and assertive, authoritative and reassuring without being overpowering.” The brackets act as both a visual representation of containment (of reputation) and a design implement to express intense focus (on a specific case).

But the rebrand runs deeper than the wordmark. The values that the new Schillings espouses and the areas in which the new Schillings operates act as the dual centrepieces for the internal and external branding, respectively.

During the rebranding process, employees were not merely consulted by leadership, but brought into the decision-making process. This was especially true when determining which core values – bold, innovative, unified, excellence – would be chosen to represent Schillings. Mills says this automatically allowed employees a sense of ownership over the new brand, “We had hundreds of words, hundreds of brainstorms. Then we filtered and filtered and filtered until the staf forum ended up with the four values.”

The physical office space of Schillings central London headquarters was also drawn into the rebrand. Interior corridors proudly display elements of the new brand and one meeting space was spray-painted by a graffiti artist in a representation of the four core values.

But the centrepiece of the rebrand is Schillings’ external communications. As it is essentially forging its own category of business, repositioning itself in the eyes of clients and prospective clients was essential. To address this, Goosebumps and Schillings worked together to choose a number of case studies that represent the threats to a company’s or individual’s reputation. And there are a lot of threats.

In the corporate case studies, unexpected crisis is represented by a single black feather, a title of ‘The Black Swan’ and 155 words of explanation. For individuals, one case, called ‘The Antisocial Network’, gives a subtle nod to Twitter showing a trio of birds on a wire with the bracketed bird looking particularly menacingly at its compatriots.

Each case is illustrated with meticulously-chosen stock photography upon which the wordmark’s brackets are superimposed. This informs the viewer of both the threat at hand and Schillings’ role in containing it. The photography is not typical of the legal sector, either. No handshakes, no meeting rooms, no be-wigged solicitors, no sign-on-the-dotted-line.

The photography was specifically chosen to tell a story and to cause a double-take on the part of the viewer. The photos are intended to make the viewer look again, to try and sort out exactly what the lone black feather or the ventriloquist or the fishing line represents. “It’s cinematic,” Cotterrell says. “Coen brothers-esque. It has some scale to it. Being a front- runner in this new sector, we didn’t want the same old crappy handshake photography all the law firms have. The images and the brackets are a means to an end. They’re there to tell a story.” Mills adds, “We’re bombarded with images and copy and ads and we don’t have to work at them, they’re very passive so they don’t stay with us. With these, you work it out yourself, that’s why it stays with you.”

The case studies themselves were painstakingly whittled down from the lengthy descriptions one might expect of legal writing into something much more digestible. Schillings’ team wrote each case study, sent it over to Goosebumps, which provided its own version, in a more copyrwritten style. And back and forth and back again until each case was distilled down to the core threat.

“We shift the blame,” Mills says of the threat case studies. “The idea is that all of these problems, they happen to any business, so what we start to do is say to our clients ‘It’s not your fault. It’s the modern world’s fault.’ It’s reassuring that we can come in and help with the subject without saying it out loud. That’s what the brand, the logo, this messaging is all about.”

Schillings intends this repositioning to change the way reputation is perceived of within business. They take an external view at the threats facing a company or individual in this weird, wired world and show stakeholders that risk management runs all the way down the supply chain and beyond. Bringing together legal expertise, risk management experience and IT security dexterity will make the world less threatening in the long run and mitigate the threats posed to reputation in the short term.

Mills says, “We’ve created a new business, a complete new company. The biggest change is that we can provide better answers now and better outcomes for our clients because of this integrated offer. Nobody else in the world, as far as we know, does what we do now. We are completely unique...For now."

Peer review

Léonie Hope, head of design, The Writer

Schillings are looking good. Really good. Take those pictures on the sliding home page; swimming shorts, water coolers, wedding-cake toppers. All closely cropped, human, bold. Stylish, even. Not necessarily what you’d expect from a risk consultancy.

But substance hasn’t been substituted for style. This is still serious business.

That’s where the square bracket motif comes in. It’s stamped across every photo as if a 50s office clerk has personally approved each one as professional enough. And then there’s the spectrum of greys around the main images to keep them authoritative and neutral. No frills needed.

So if I was all about the design and only about the design, I’d say full marks. But. I work at a language consultancy. My writing colleagues have brainwashed me to always ‘click through’. Check for consistency. Look a bit deeper. Read more.

At first glance, the writing looks as good as the visuals. Snappy headlines pop off the page: ‘It’s not if, it’s when’; ‘The Costly Tweet’ and ‘The Kids Are Not Alright’. Just like the design, these one-liners are unexpected, although not unprofessional. But a few clicks through, and what do we find? “Reputation Resilience is a study into the emerging professionalization of corporate reputational risk management.”

You were so close, Schillings. But your website is speckled with that kind of corporate-blah. Where did these whitewashed words come from? Where’s the confidence and personality of the visuals? With these inconsistencies, that spark of something a little unexpected snaps suddenly back into the personality of, well, just another law company.