For the love of the name

The brave new world of “alternative business structures”, when solicitors will be able to share ownership of firms with members of other professions or none, will raise a few issues of nomenclature. With what names will these hybrid entities present themselves to the public?

Most solicitors' firms cling to the ancient custom of calling themselves by the names of current or former partners. Before 1990 the rules required a firm name to include the names of one or more of its present or former principal solicitors, unless the Council of the Law Society approved an alternative in writing.

In 1990, Solicitors' Practice Rule 11 condensed the requirement to: “A firm must not use a name which: (a) is misleading or (b) brings the profession into disrepute.” But guidance notes, added a number of qualifications. You could not call your firm a law centre and you could not use the name of an actual person other than a current or former principal in the firm. However, there was no problem with using historical characters unconnected with the practice (so, apparently, you could call yourself Julius Caesar, Boadicea & Co). Now the Solicitors' Code of Conduct 2007 has replaced the 1990 rules and the rule concerning firm names is subsumed under the general rule 7. This simply declares that publicity must be neither misleading nor inaccurate. So subject to that qualification, solicitors and the new hybrid bodies are free to call themselves what they want. I rather regret the passing of the old rules. Faced with a rash of invented identities I will feel nostalgia for the famous names of the past.

Branding matters

Made up names are of course already with us. The marketing experts have long stressed the vital importance of the brand. Name recognition is the name of the game.

So it is odd that some firms have already chosen bland anonymity. Instead of human names they have substituted the name of their speciality—“Public Interest Lawyers”, or “Family Law Partnership”. Others use initials to hide individual names—“DLA” “AS Law” or “K Legal”. Yet others have descended to facetiousness. “H2O”, the chemical symbol for water, seeks notoriety by sheer incongruity. On three occasions I was faced with the task of choosing the name of a new firm; The first time, when I was a sole practitioner, I used my own name and that was that. I don't recall even thinking about it; The second time I and my more experienced partner simply joined our two surnames—his of course coming first; On the third occasion there were four of us setting up in partnership together. We might have used all four names—rarely done in Britain but common in the US. I worked there briefly for a firm called Marcus McCroskey Finucane and Libner.
 
I also recall a plaque on the door of my office at Northwestern law school with the name of its donor: Mayer Friedlich Tierney Brown Spiess and Platt. There is kudos in the US in being a “name partner”. But Mayer etc eventually found it all too much and have now shrunk to Mayer Brown. Boringly we ended up with my surname (I was the oldest), followed by the anodyne “and Partners”.

Identity matters

I am not convinced that lawyers do themselves any favours by disguising their identities. I was a partner for some years in a firm called Lawford & Co., well known in the trade union world and now sadly defunct. The firm had been founded by Ben Hooberman and Michael Kelly. Ben revealed to me that Lawford was a name they had made up to avoid calling themselves Hooberman & Kelly. In Ben's view this would have sounded more like a music hall act rather than a law firm. But a combination of ethnic names—English, Jewish, Irish, or otherwise—is both entertaining and illuminating about the social history of the profession. In America, the aristocratic “white shoe” firms of Wall street have the Anglo-Saxon names of their ancestors: Cadwalader, Wickersham and Taft; White & Case; Wilmer Cutler Pickering. More modern firms have a different ethnic mix: Schulte, Roth and Zabel; O'Melveny & Myers; Sonnenschein, Nath and Rosenthal. In Britain links with firms in mainland Europe have produced some interesting combinations—Freshfields Deringer Bruckhaus, for example.

Blandness, impersonality, even dehumanisation is encouraged by the shift from a profession concentrated in sole practitioners and small firms towards the pressurised beehive environments of the international conglomerates. I fear it will come to seem increasingly strange to identify the new institutions, magnified by amalgamation with non-lawyers, by the names of long dead individuals. There will be a growing temptation to find labels which stress the corporatised uniformity of their faceless staff. I would prefer them to resist that temptation. They should heed the lesson of the Post Office, which changed its name to Consignia and then changed it back again. We need history; we need personality; we need nostalgia. Or is it already too late?