Rebranding a Top Trial Lawyers Group
The Litigation Counsel of America (LCA) is an invitation-only trial lawyer honorary society.
It was established to reflect the new face of the American bar. Membership is limited to 3,500 Fellows. The LCA offers its member great opportunities for education, professional development, networking, and referrals.
Ross Fishman speaks twice a year at the LCA educational conferences, on the hottest CLE and marketing topics, including e.g. LinkedIn and social media, online marketing, websites trends, and ethics.
A group this prestigious deserves highly credible marketing.
It was time for a makeover. LCA’s original website was intentionally sparse and understated, but website design had changed and LCA needed a dramatic new look to reflect its legal industry leadership.
Founded by Steve Henry, a big-firm litigator, the LCA Fellow were of the absolute highest caliber, and the conferences were extremely educational and at outstanding locations. The true value, of course, was the networking among the lawyers that helped develop close friendships and created countless co-counsel opportunities and referrals.
There are many self-proclaimed honorary associations, ranging from simple vanity directories like Who’s Who, to groups with integrity and rigorous vetting processes like LCA. The challenge for the credible groups is to ensure that the invitees understand that an invitation to join is a legitimate honor. In an era where top lawyers receive too many hollow invitations, LCA couldn’t risk potentially being lumped in with the bogus groups that are primarily interested in selling costly crystal trophies and wall plaques.
A cutting-edge website would help make the case.
We determined to build it around dramatic, heavily shadowed black-and-white photos of the members, to showcase LCA’s outstanding lawyers and diverse membership. It’s a robust and user-friendly site, built with the powerful WordPress content-management system. It offers all the functionality a national organization would need, including mobile-ready, membership database, sign-up forms, conference information, and social media connectivity.
Before and after versions of the website:
LCA’s logo issues.
LCA’s previous logo was trying to accomplish too many different tasks, which made it difficult to read. It included an interlocking set of initials, the association’s full name, a descriptor (“Trial Lawyer Honorary Society”), and tag line (“In Honor of Excellence”).
That’s an awful lot of information for a logo, which meant that most design elements had been reduced in size. We therefore stripped it down to the most important elements and enhanced its visual appeal and readability. We redesigned it to simply “LCA,” the three bold initials. This reflected how everyone already referred to it — “Litigation Counsel of America” was simply too long to use regularly.
But initials have no independent meaning.
Therefore, we elected to add a short tag line to inform viewers what this “LCA” group was: “Proven Trial Lawyers.” That is, “Trial Lawyer Honorary Society” was nicely descriptive, but it was just too long to use in a simple logo without shrinking it to the point of illegibility.
Before and after versions of the logo:
We showcased LCA Fellows across the website: