Law firms by the very nature of their business, put out a huge amount of paperwork through the day to day correspondence. It is one of your fundamental necessities on practicing law – well, until everything goes paperless. Why do law firms not take more care in the design and appeal of their company logo?
As we mentioned above, there is so much paperwork produced in the daily tasks of law, why not take full advantage of the eyes that will peruse the pages. Very often you will find that the letter/contract/deed/will/lease will not only be seen by your client, but many other people that catch a glimpse of the documents.
- On their desk in their office – colleagues will see it
- When they show the document to friends
- On route, while being delivered, the envelope should proudly display your logo.
These opportunities are wasted if your logo is not attractive or different.
Needless to say, your logo will be used in many other important places – a lot of time and effort should go into this creation – don’t drop the ball when it comes to mundane correspondence, there are great opportunities for it to be seen by prospects.
Here are a few points to consider with your company letterhead:
Colour
It is more expensive that black and white, but it looks that much more professional. If you have to, print the logo in colour and then have the laser do the rest of the letterhead detail in black.
Bulk printing
Go ahead and do the paper with your logo, but don’t rush into printing the address, telephone numbers and partners on the letterhead – the slightest change in any details will have you tossing the expensive pre-printed paper away and having to buy more.
Skills
There are many power users of MS Word – which most law firms use, find one or find a company to setup your letterhead templates and the use of the pre-printed stationary/plain paper printers. The initial setup of the letterhead with the pre-printed paper is critical to getting professional looking correspondence out of your doors.
Standardisation
In a law firm….you must be kidding!! Store the standard letterheads in the same place on the network, allow one person to edit this template and try to have one standard that everyone uses. Allow the department centric details to merge with the standard template. It must be read-only, otherwise people will change or delete the template. And force the formatting you want for your documents to be setup from the main template.
Embossed
Costs more but leaves an impression.
Logo design
Remember all the other formats you are going to use the logo for with your business, like the building signage, emails, mobile apps, web pages and the letterhead – make sure the designers take all of these applications into consideration to make sure the logo looks the same throughout.
Designer
Hire a designer to produce a solid, clean and practical logo – find somebody who has done work for other firms that have good logos. Online designers are fine, but just make sure you give them a better than normal brief on what you want. You should not design it yourself, you practise law, they design graphics – enough said.
Aspects of a good logo
- Simple – Clean, simple to reproduce, standard colours
- Memorable – It should stick in the mind of a person who has seen it, clever use of combining characters of the partner’s names for example
- Timeless – Orange might be the new Black, but it will pass – don’t get caught in the current trend, create for a long-lasting logo that will stand the test of time
- Versatile – be able to look good on all media
- Appropriate – It needs to look professional, you are a professional business. Don’t use font they often use for jokes.
In short, your logo is seen thousands of times each day, make sure you grab the opportunity to market to these eyes. It will be one of the cheapest advertising you will ever do.
