Most professional services firms have developed a strategic brand positioning that is genuinely ambitious — and that, if fully realised, would be commercially powerful. However, what very few have solved is how to translate that positioning into a tangible, specific, and distinctive client experience that creates a self-reinforcing loop between aspiration and reality.

The firms that have solved it — consciously or unconsciously — have done so through brand symbols.

A brand symbol is not a logo or a tagline. It is something — a behaviour, a policy, a physical environment, a way of working — that communicates what a firm stands for more convincingly than any claim could. Symbols work because they are specific, because they cost something, and because they are consistent. They cannot be faked. They require a firm to have made a genuine decision about what it is, and to have held that decision under pressure.

The result, when it works, is a feedback loop. The experience reinforces the positioning. The positioning shapes the experience. Over time, the gap between what the firm claims and what clients feel closes — and what remains is something the market begins to recognise and reward.

A brand symbol is not a logo or a tagline. It is anything that communicates what a firm stands for more convincingly than any claim could.

What a symbol actually is

They are everywhere once you look for them. Apple’s packaging — the density of the card, the precision of the protective stickers, the small vacuum engineered into the box so that it opens with a particular resistance — is a symbol of a company that believes the experience of a product begins before it is even used. Virgin Atlantic’s airport lounges, which it calls Clubhouses, are a symbol of a firm that chose to compete on experience in a business where almost everything else — the aircraft, the airports, the security queues — is identical to its competitors.

In professional services markets where technical competence is assumed and differentiation is genuinely difficult, a brand symbol that makes a firm’s positioning tangible is worth considerably more than a well-crafted proposition. The proposition tells the market what to think. The symbol gives the market something to feel.

Kirkland & Ellis: one conviction, two markets

Kirkland & Ellis is widely recognised as the dominant force in private equity law. What is less often observed is why. Plenty of other firms have built credible private equity practices through strategic hires, targeted investment, and sustained effort. What none of them has replicated is what Kirkland actually did: not merely enter the market but institutionalise a positioning so completely that the firm and the asset class became, in the minds of the people who matter, essentially synonymous. The roots of this subtle but critical difference lie in their litigation heritage and its distinctive ‘scorched earth’ approach.

In a 2002 profile, American Lawyer wrote that no big firm embraces the trial culture so jubilantly as Kirkland — where the internal ethos held that you were a lightweight if your case was not tried. The firm was unapologetic about its aggressiveness. It preferred to lead rather than co-counsel. It was described by peers as unnecessarily aggressive — a characterisation the firm regarded as a competitive advantage rather than a criticism. One headhunter captured the culture precisely: “Lawyers sent to Kirkland were anxious to go. They knew they would make money, and it was a tribute to the firm that it did not try to soft-pedal how demanding a place it was. Other firms were just as tough, without the rewards, and without being so honest about themselves.”

That same conviction — total commitment, complete alignment with the client’s interest in winning — was then carried into private equity, where it became something even more powerful. Kirkland’s ties to private equity date nearly to the industry’s inception, beginning with a single relationship in the early 1970s between a young Kirkland attorney named Jack Levin and the head of a fledgling venture capital unit at First Chicago Corp. Levin went on to lay the legal groundwork for the entire private equity industry, and Kirkland went on to become synonymous with it.

What followed was a flywheel effect that most firms never achieve. The more private equity work Kirkland did, the more proprietary intelligence it accumulated — deal terms, market precedents, counterparty behaviour — building a database that its rivals simply could not replicate. The firm hired data scientists to build analytics capabilities from that accumulated knowledge. The result was a position of such market prevalence that Kirkland was not merely advising on deals but helping to set the terms on which the market itself operated. Dominance became self-reinforcing.

The symbol here is not just the scorched-earth approach in the courtroom. It is the totality of how Kirkland chose to be in the market. Partners invested in their clients’ funds alongside them. The firm operates its own internal secondary market, allowing partners to trade stakes among themselves. Eschewing the collegiate approach, compensation is tied entirely to performance and the ability to generate and sustain client relationships. Every element of how the firm is structured expresses the same underlying idea: we are not your advisers at arm’s length. We are aligned with you. We win when you win.

In 2025, the firm exceeded $10 billion in annual revenue, with average equity partner compensation of around $10 to $11 million. Alongside only one other firm — Latham & Watkins, which also successfully leverages brand symbols in its own way — Kirkland has pulled sufficiently clear of the rest of the market to occupy a different tier entirely. That is not a communications outcome. It is the commercial consequence of a brand symbol held with absolute consistency over five decades.

Symbols work because they are specific, because they cost something, and because they are consistent. They cannot be faked.

Goldman Sachs: the vase on the ledge

I visited the Goldman Sachs offices in Hong Kong some years ago. In most reception areas of global professional services firms, you find the predictable accumulation of award plaques and carefully selected artwork — the visual grammar of a firm telling you how prestigious it is.

The Goldman Sachs reception was different. The space was elegant and restrained. And on a ledge overlooking the city far below, there was a single object: a beautiful Chinese vase. Beside it, a small inscription identifying it as “a gift from Li Ka-shing” — one of the most influential investors in Asia.

Nothing else was said. Nothing needed to be. The symbol did its work with complete economy: we advise the people who matter most in this city. The confidence to let that object speak, and to resist the temptation to add anything else, is itself an expression of the brand.

Baker McKenzie: the culture of friendship, made structural

Most professional services firms describe their client relationships in terms of trust, partnership, and long-term commitment. Baker McKenzie chose to make one of those ideas structural rather than rhetorical.

When the firm holds its global or regional partner meetings, the two to three days preceding the internal sessions are given over to a series of client events at the same location — not only panels and keynote formats, valuable as those can be, but open sessions where partners and clients move together through the venue, professionally and socially, in a way that makes it genuinely difficult for an outsider to identify who is who.

It is an unusual and deliberate choice. It costs something — in time, in logistics, in the willingness to let something so important be less controlled and more organic. And it communicates, without a single word of positioning language, what Baker McKenzie means when it says that a culture of friendship, with its clients not just within the firm, is not an aspiration but a practice.

The scorched earth approach in the courtroom and the dominance of private equity are not two separate brand stories. They are the same conviction expressed in two different markets.

The unnamed firm: clarity as discipline

One of the most powerful brand symbols I have encountered operates at the level of behaviour rather than environment, and it belongs to a well-known Wall Street firm I advised but cannot name. The firm’s positioning was built around clarity of thought and judgment — a direct counter to the perception that legal advice is often verbose, heavily caveated, and reluctant to reach a conclusion.

The brand symbol the firm operationalised was a discipline: any client communication, however complex the underlying matter, should be written so that a client reading it on a mobile phone could understand what was being said and what they should do from the first screen alone. The detail could follow. But the conclusion, the recommendation, the point of view — these had to be visible immediately.

Alongside this, the firm adopted a client service principle that they chose not to dilute despite its absolute specificity: ‘Never say, “on the one hand, on the other hand.”’ It sounds like a small thing. It is not. It requires lawyers to form a point of view, to commit to it, and to present it with confidence. It is a discipline that runs counter to the professional instinct to hedge. And it is, precisely because of that tension, that it is a genuine symbol of what the firm believes about what good advice looks like.

What symbols require

Brand symbols are not marketing decisions. They are leadership decisions.

Creating a symbol means making a choice about what the firm is prepared to do consistently, not just claim occasionally. Kirkland’s meritocratic compensation model, its co-investment alongside clients, and its forensic accumulation of market intelligence were not communications initiatives. They were strategic choices that expressed a conviction and held it under pressure over decades. Baker McKenzie’s client events required the willingness to let something important be slightly uncontrolled. Goldman Sachs’s reception required the confidence to say very little, even though every instinct in professional services marketing says to say more.

What is worth understanding — and what the examples in this article are intended to show — is that most firms already have the raw material. Brand symbols are rarely invented from scratch. They are more often latent: embedded in how the firm has always operated, in stories that partners tell, in ways of acting that have never been formally recognised as expressions of what the firm stands for. The Baker McKenzie client events existed long before anyone called them a brand symbol. Kirkland’s alignment with its clients predated any deliberate brand strategy. The leader’s role — whether managing partner or CMO — is often not to invent but to surface, name, and then protect what is already there. To breathe fire into existing strengths.

That is also a legitimate long-term ambition. Some symbols can be strengthened quickly, once they are recognised for what they are. Others — the kind that become truly institutionalised, that shape how a firm recruits, how it works, how it is experienced by clients over years — take longer to establish. That is not a reason to delay. It is a reason to start. A managing partner who identifies one genuine symbol and commits to holding it consistently over five years will have done more for the firm’s market position than a decade of repositioning exercises.

It also means accepting that a symbol, once established, has to be held. A firm that introduces a distinctive client experience and then quietly abandons it has not just lost a marketing asset. It has signalled, to everyone paying attention, that the positioning it claimed was not something it was genuinely prepared to defend.

The firms that do this well — that build brand symbols as durable expressions of a genuine strategic conviction — find that the symbols do work that language alone cannot. They make a firm’s positioning legible in a way that a proposition never quite manages. They give clients something to remember, something to recount, something to use when they are recommending the firm to a colleague who has never encountered it.