Over the past few months CMS Cameron McKenna’s managing partner Duncan Weston has been on a charm offensive. Through lunches and presentations, he has been trying to convince the legal press that the European-wide CMS network is not just a disparate alliance, but is in fact one firm, no different to, say, Norton Rose or Squire Sanders.
In the end, we agreed with him. The technical structuring of the firm (which we won’t get into here) is similar to many Swiss Vereins that make it into our charts.
But what had us scratching our heads was that CMS doesn’t look or feel like a single firm because it doesn’t have a coherent brand. The shared CMS brand is confusing; the individual firms have retained their own names, for example CMS Derks Star Busmann in the Netherlands and CMS Cameron McKenna in the UK.
CMS is making the right noises about simplifying its name and has mooted ditching the Cameron McKenna tag, but the tough decision to streamline its name should have been made ten years ago when the network was first formed.
But does it matter? Yes. It’s easy to scoff at branding as just something that business development and PR types are interested in, but it’s intimately intertwined with how your clients view you.
As a client am I going to feel comfortable that a network like CMS will give me a consistent service across Europe when the firm can’t even get a consistent name across the piece? Probably not.
Firms should be praised for making the gutsy move to impose simplified branding early on in their mergers.
Contrast CMS to Norton Rose, which despite bringing four firms from Canada, Australia and South Africa into the fold over the past two years has managed to keep its name and branding consistent. Behind the scenes, things are far less coherent: Norton Rose has three different financial year ends, does not fully share profits and has to artificially calculate a combined turnover figure using the UK financial year. It doesn’t even declare a combined global profit figure. But that doesn’t matter as externally, to clients and pundits alike, the firm looks like a joined up entity.
Firms have traditionally fudged brand names following a merger, pandering to egos, producing hybrid names, particularly in transatlantic tie-ups. For instance, we had Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw and Reed Smith Richards Butler for a few years before both firms wised up.
Firms do seem to be taking branding more seriously these days and some are now taking the difficult decision to stick with a single firm name when merger deals are inked. Pinsent Masons and McGrigors merged this year and the new firm will simply be called Pinsent Masons while in 2011 Clyde & Co ditched the Barlow Lyde & Gilbert brand after the two combined.
Those firms should be praised for making the gutsy move to impose simplified branding early on in their mergers, rather than fudging the matter with a blended brand name.
To outsiders it doesn’t matter how the firm is structured but it does matter that a firm looks like a single entity. With further mergers (Howard Kennedy FSI, anyone?) it’s time to be bold with the branding.