Following the recent announcement of White & Black’s rebrand, Sam Ridgway, the firm’s Head of Marketing and CSR delves deeper into the motivations and strategic thinking behind the firm’s evolved identity.
White & Black has always recognised that legal challenges are deeply intertwined with broader business objectives. Approximately 12 months ago, the firm embarked on a comprehensive review of its existing branding. As those who have undertaken such projects will attest, rebranding extends far beyond new logos and visual identities, it necessitates a thorough examination of the entire business—its purpose, culture, and core values. Long before any creative process began, the firm dedicated significant effort to understanding the true drivers behind its service and articulating the unique value it offers to clients.
White & Black’s purpose is clear: to provide strategic legal advice that empowers business leaders to achieve growth, manage risk, and maximise value. This commitment to genuine value and long-term partnership highlighted that the firm’s previous branding no longer fully reflected its refined strategy, values, or market positioning, necessitating this transformative change. This piece explores the core reasons driving this rebrand and details how White & Black arrived at its new look and feel.
Strategic business bdvisors
White & Black recognises that in today’s business landscape, business leaders need advisors that offer more than specific sector and practice area focuses.
Legal questions don’t exist in a vacuum, they are driven by business plans, business objectives, and what’s going on in the world. Leaders require a strategic advisor, acting as an extension of their own team, proactively identifying opportunities, mitigating risks, and driving to meet commercial objectives.
Having founded the firm in 2007, the team at White & Black understands the entrepreneurial journey firsthand—from the challenges of starting a company and the complexities of running it, to the strategic decisions involved in selling and buying back a business. This lived experience fuels White & Black’s unique approach, enabling the firm to anticipate and address common frustrations that business leaders often encounter with legal advisors, such as:
Inconsistent quality of services: A reliable, consistently excellent service provides clients with invaluable peace of mind. White & Black’s commitment to consistent excellence is rooted in its award-winning, top-ranking expertise. The White & Black team comprises technical specialists from diverse backgrounds, ensuring high-quality, solutions-oriented advice and measurable outcomes in every interaction.
Bill shock: White & Black understand the need for budget predictability and demonstrable ROI. Defining scope and value upfront, the firm has moved beyond open-ended hourly billing to bespoke models that provide clarity and certainty, ensuring clients invest in solutions, not just hours.
Being passed from pillar to post: Business leaders want to run businesses, not coordinate legal advisors. With its one-stop-shop service, White & Black takes ownership of client objectives, providing a central point of contact that coordinates all necessary expertise from the firm’s immediate and wider network. Managing projects end-to-end for a truly wrap-around experience, the firm can offer a comprehensive solution without administrative burden.
A lack of commercial application: White & Black’s advice is always grounded in a deep understanding of clients’ commercial realities and the firm’s own extensive business experience. The firm acts as a strategic partner and an extension of the client’s team, asking forensic questions, challenging conventional approaches, and shaping advice to ensure it serves the commercial objectives of the client.
The process
In early 2024, White & Black formally embarked on its rebranding journey. The firm recognised that its visual look and feel no longer properly represented its service offering, principles of working, or market positioning. To address the disjoint between its internal understanding of its brand proposition and its external image and narrative, White & Black began work on fully articulating, and then visualising, its unique approach to providing strategic advice.
Engaging Cambridge-based agency, Mobas, the firm’s process was informed by rigorous research and, most importantly, by listening intently to its clients and dedicated team. The research program gathered valuable insights from current clients, lapsed clients, and staff, uncovering key themes, opportunities, and challenges that shaped the brand project.
White & Black’s early-stage process involved:
Discovery Sessions: Articulating the firm’s identity, its history, and its future aspirations – working to fully understand, align, and define its core purpose.
Desk Research & Competitor Analysis: Grounding the strategy in market realities, understanding White & Black’s position, its competitors, and how it can offer a distinct and compelling proposition.
Stakeholder Feedback: This involved surveys, in-depth interviews, and workshops with clients, team members, and special advisors – ensuring that the firm’s evolution resonates with those who matter most.
Key insights from stakeholders
Stakeholder feedback played an invaluable role in shaping White & Black’s evolved approach. These insights reinforced the firm’s belief in the need for a more client-centric, commercially aware, and results-oriented approach. Insights from clients underscored their experience:
“It’s deeper than a transactional relationship. They’re [White & Black] are more like an extension of our team, replacing the need for in-house legal advice.”
Similarly, internal team members described White & Black’s differentiating approach:
“The emphasis is on the quality of output and the relevance to the client. Other firms generate a lot of documents and paperwork. We generate answers.”
Articulating its network approach
White & Black offers more than legal advice, providing a comprehensive ‘wrap around’ service to clients spanning legal, commercial, strategic and communication needs. This approach leverages a cultivated network of trusted professionals, functioning as White & Black’s wider team, across various legal practice areas, international jurisdictions and other professional services. Taking this approach means clients gain direct, streamlined access to world and industry-leading expertise precisely when it’s required, eliminating the hidden costs and fragmentation often associated with managing multiple advisors or full-service firms.
This network approach is something White & Black has always utilised and continues to develop. However, during the earliest stages of the rebranding process it was identified as a truly unique feature of the firm’s operation that required greater exposure and explanation. The rebranding process allowed White & Black to refine and articulate this element of its offering, developing the firm’s network approach into a key differentiator and integrating it as a key constituent of the firm’s strategic direction.
A fresh look
The final stage of the rebranding journey focussed on the creative process. Through workshops, feedback sessions and amendment rounds, the firm worked with Mobas to develop a comprehensive set of brand guidelines, a new logo, new colour palettes, new roll-out assets (digital and physical) and more.
White & Black’s new visual identity, encapsulated in the firm’s website, is designed to reflect the firm’s modern approach, clarity of thought, and commitment to doing things differently. The new identity embodies White & Black – a comprehensive service with a difference, focused on driving tangible outcomes for business leaders. Alongside the new visual assets, White & Black developed comprehensive brand and tone of voice guidelines, along with clear messaging pillars to ensure consistency and impact across all communications, both internal and external.
Find out more
White & Black invites you to learn more about its new brand and the difference in how it provides legal services by visiting its website.
Sam Ridgway is Head of Marketing and CSR at White & Black.