RDJ
Building a law firm
for the future
Evolving the brand strategy and visual identity for an agile and resilient law firm of tomorrow.
As the legal industry deals with the on-going impact and disruption caused by Covid in 2021 and beyond, RDJ required a brand strategy that would capture the authenticity and intelligence at their heart while also matching their ambition to deliver unrivalled business impact for their clients.
The Challenge
Disruption has ensued since the dawn of the digital era — but it exploded in intensity and breadth starting in 2020. Customers and employees are demanding more while the list of challenges to progress keeps growing. As a result, the need to act quickly and intelligently in the moment has never been so critical. The old ways of working no longer work. The future is up for grabs.
Our challenge was to build a brand at the intersection of law, business, and people. To capture the authenticity and intelligence at the heart of RDJ, differentiating them from their traditional competitors and new entrants to the sector.
Solution
We began by designing a highly collaborative programme of discovery, delving deep into the legal industry and the challenges it was facing. Together, we began to uncover the strategic direction for the brand to inform the creative approach, driven by the positioning of Legal Insight, Human Intelligence, Business Impact.
From here, we shaped the value territories to produce the guiding principles behind everything RDJ do. These values–Ambitious for Progress, Restless for Results, Straight Talkers and One Team–form the foundation of RDJ’s culture and how they act.
Finally, we developed a vision for the future that RDJ’s teams truly believed in. To be our clients’ most trusted advisor and the employer of choice for legal talent in Ireland, rooting the brand in the present and establishing their ambition for the future. With the new brand strategy allowing RDJ to forge a path to an agile, creative, and resilient tomorrow, it was time to bring it to life.
RichardsDee are a really talented, strategic team at the top of their game. They took the time to really understand us and what we were trying to achieve; but also pushed us to be different and to differentiate. They delivered a brand that speaks to who we are, our culture and what we believe in. An outstanding agency that delivered exactly what we hoped for and more.
Linda Kelleher, Marketing Director, RDJ
We built on the new values to develop a bold tone of voice that aligned everyone behind the progressive and enterprising attitude uncovered in the workshops. By balancing ambition with a fuss-free, engaging way of communicating we delivered a flexible and future-focused tone of voice that’s simple to implement.
The RDJ logo was designed for impact. With the move from Ronan Daly Jermyn to RDJ, the newly shortened name prioritised clarity and impact. While taking up the same physical width of the previous logo we could now ensure impact and legibility at the smallest of sizes. The angled incisions in the logo represent RDJ’s agility and commitment to moving their industry forward alongside the brightest talent and biggest clients.
A visual identity system was developed which heroes the logo, using it as a super-graphic to create a dynamic and modern graphic treatment. A window through which impact is realised, opening up a world of potential application possibilities.
This impact extends to RDJ’s colour palette, anchored in white to capture their commitment to clarity and punctuated by a suite of secondary colours to differentiate from competitors and add variety across communications.
Finally, the brand was brought to life across a series of key touchpoints, including RDJ’s website, environment branding, email templates, file boxes, stationery, proposals and branded merchandise. The new brand has united the firm behind a new purpose, vision and set of values that better reflects the future of the organisation.
