Squire Patton…Who?
Graham Archbold
Client Research for Professional Services | Founder at Chorus Insight
Last week saw the launch of our market report on service and value for money standards in legal. A lot of well-known law firms did very well. And some less well-known too. In fact, the firm on our roster that came out in tenth place overall had quite a few of our FTSE-100 Heads of Legal (HoL) commentators somewhat flummoxed.
On the tip of nobody’s tongue
Here’s a word for word reaction by one:
HoL: I don’t know Squire Patton Boggs; I don’t know who they are actually.
Interviewer: The old Hammonds.
HoL: The old Squire Sanders?
Interviewer: Yes, Squire Sanders & Dempsey.
HoL: Yes, Hammonds right. Well I wouldn’t use a firm with a name like Squire Patton Boggs – looks too American for me. They should have kept Hammonds then I would at least know who the hell they were.
And this sort of reaction, while a bit glibber than most, was by no means an isolated case. Others struggled with the identity of the mysterious firm:
HoL: Squires Patton Boggs – is that the old Hammonds Suddards? I still think of them as Hammonds, the Leeds firm….
Another reaction, the legal head reading down the top-10 index:
HoL: I would say that the winners there are Slaughters, Herbert Smith, Allen & Overy …Squire Patton Boggs what a dreadful name!
One Head of Legal out of our 12 interviewees was not only aware of the firm but also had experience of instructing them:
HoL: I’m using them mostly in the US, but their technology team in Birmingham is very good.
Wiping out value
Squire Patton Boggs has 45 offices globally with four in the UK: Birmingham, Leeds, London and Manchester. It’s a firm with an annual turnover just shy of a billion dollars. And yet, when we interviewed heads of legal at a dozen FTSE-100 companies? Blank faces, somewhat disparaging comments. Had we said ‘Hammonds have done well, they’re in tenth place’, I dare say everyone would have known who we were talking about. So here you have a firm with a history going back to 1887, founded in Yorkshire, with a top-ranking client service offering yet with virtually no brand recollection in the marketplace among key buyers of legal services. There’s a lesson here and it’s about the value of name recognition.
We make our own entertainment at Nisus so when firms merge, we jokingly speculate about which name will get dropped and how soon after the merge. Often it just seems like a matter of pride for the absorbed firm in the relationship. At a practical level a name can only be so long. But there’s at least some transitional period that gives the market time to get used to the new name for the association to rub off.
Lessons in branding
Nisus doesn’t work with Squire Patton Boggs, we just happen to have data on the firm as a by-product of our research in the legal market. However, conducting post matter reviews for DAC Beachcroft, for a long time I’ve wondered when they’d drop the ‘DAC’ bit. Verbally it’s a bit clumsy and nine out of ten clients just call them Beachcroft. They merged in 2011, the same year that Hammonds became Squire Patton Boggs. I realise now that DAC Beachcroft are right to keep the ‘DAC’ element because Davies Arnold Cooper as a brand still retains a lot of trust and respect, particularly within the insurance market. It doesn’t make sense to throw away that value.
In the case of Squire Patton Boggs, based on the sentiment of leading Heads of Legal, the value of Hammonds has been prematurely erased. No more carrier pigeon, whippet or chip butty print adverts, which seems a shame.