Leading Family Law
Brief Case Study: Grant Crawford Watson LLP – Law
Crafting a brand to position and support an established family law firm as it expands.
Grant Crawford Watson LLP (GCW) is a boutique family law firm in Toronto. GCW specializes in counsel work, arbitration, and mediation in challenging family law matters, with a focus on complex financial issues, high-net-worth clientele, and high-profile cases.
The firm’s objective is to provide the highest quality of work and service while maintaining a sustainable, profitable, and growing legal practice.
CASCO worked with GCW to create a new brand identity that would align with the firm’s high-profile and leverage the reputation of its key senior lawyers as it entered a new era of growth as a limited partnership.
Challenge
Changing a law firm’s name is a sensitive business decision. The inclusion or exclusion of any of the principals’ names in the firm’s new name can imply their level of involvement and send mixed messages to its clientele and other stakeholders. When GCW (formerly known as Grant & Sadvari) decided to embark on a name change, a series of strategic decisions had to be made to define the elements that would shape the new brand expression.
We were assigned the task of developing a unique positioning that would maintain GCW’s status as a leader in family law.
Solution
The process began with developing a positioning strategy, which helped us establish a brand character through the traits and attributes that would resonate with the firm’s target market and audience. Part of the mandate was to place the firm in a tier associated with exclusivity and high levels of service.
The new creative direction combines light and bold typography with a custom pattern of fine lines that represents the partners’ different practice styles and their ability to complement each other, conveying a convergence of their expertise. These elements were used to create the new wordmark, which shows each partners’ name equally in combination with the pattern to establish a sense of partner equality. The logo was animated for use in digital formats to strengthen this message.
This creative direction is used throughout GCW’s stationery, website, and merchandising items, supported by vivid professional photography. The easy-to-navigate website has a clean and modern look that aligns with the updated creative direction, while the stationery employs a letterpress technique to suggest close attention to detail.
“The CASCO team was sensational in creating a design that was perfect for our vibrant firm.”
Stephen Grant, Grant Crawford Watson LLP
