The challenge
Communicate the intellectual excellence, variety, inclusiveness, scale and difference of one of the UK’s most prestigious law firms to attract the best new graduates from a variety of backgrounds. The work was carried out in collaboration with Rose Design.
What we did
Extensive interviews led to a complete overhaul of their existing collateral to communicate a disarming and charming intelligence vital for inspiring a young audience.
The brochure:
- Was a shade less formal… sentences beginning with ‘And’ and ‘But’, for example, and contractions, both to be more persuasive and more approachable with the target audience in mind.
- Used imaginative instead of purely functional headlines: “Great ideas are not measured by clocks”.
- Featured interviews that used exchanges of dialogue to communicate the animated and genuine nature of the people involved, replacing direct quotes which felt forced and unnatural.
- Worked so, so hard to capture that difference. Because they are different.
What happened next
This was 2012 and the words are still being used today. We update the brochure each year, but the bulk of the text remains untouched. I was subsequently commissioned to write other pieces, including the firm’s corporate responsibility brochure and other strategy pieces that have similarly withstood the test of time. I’ve also written for their Best Friend partner firm in Madrid, Uría Menéndez for a number of years.
I’m immensely proud that this piece is still held to be the benchmark for this kind of communication amongst these Magic Circle-style firms and across Slaughter’s Best Friends network of leading lawyers in Europe – not least because Slaughter and May are frequent benchmark setters themselves, thought leaders in the world of law.
