Epigram | The rebrand is only the beginning: why rollout is where brands really succeed (or quietly unravel)
In the legal sector, mergers tend to come with a big moment. A new name. A confident visual identity. Carefully crafted positioning that explains what the combined firm now stands for. There’s usually a proper launch plan behind it, and rightly so. A merger is a major shift and the brand has to signal that clearly.
We lead full rebrand projects ourselves, from strategy through to identity and launch, so we know how much thought goes into getting that part right. But what experience has taught us, time and again, is that the launch isn’t the hardest bit.
The hard bit is what comes next.
Once the new brand is approved and ready to go live, firms are left with an enormous volume of existing material that suddenly feels out of date. Pitch decks, credentials documents, sector brochures, ESG reports, internal templates, website content, and that’s before you even consider multiple offices and practice areas. In larger firms, you’re easily looking at hundreds of documents that need reviewing, redesigning and reissuing, often within weeks of launch.
This is the part that’s often underestimated. Budget is allocated to strategy and creative development, but rollout is assumed to be manageable internally. In reality, marketing and BD teams are already stretched. They’re navigating partner approvals, live pitches and day-to-day requests while trying to interpret brand guidelines and retrofit legacy documents at speed. Without proper structure and capacity, old and new identities end up running in parallel, which quietly chips away at the sense of unity the merger was meant to create.
On a recent large-scale rollout for a UK law firm following a significant brand refresh, we were brought in at exactly that point, brand finalised, launch imminent, and a substantial amount of business development material needing to move into the new identity quickly. The scope wasn’t small. We designed 26 templates across Microsoft PowerPoint and Adobe InDesign to ensure consistency across both platforms, and over a two-month period refreshed close to 100 live documents into the new brand style.
That kind of work isn’t just about applying new colours and fonts. It requires structured planning, shared tracking systems and careful prioritisation of high-impact materials. It also requires real cross-platform expertise. Legal teams don’t operate in a single design environment, and if the brand behaves differently in Microsoft compared to Adobe, inconsistency creeps in almost immediately. Building templates that are technically robust and genuinely intuitive to use reduces the risk of brand drift and gives BD teams confidence to work independently within the new system.
This is also where our follow-the-sun model genuinely comes into its own. With teams in the UK and Malaysia, we can move significant volumes of collateral through review and redesign cycles without compromising quality, and in a merger context, momentum matters.
It’s worth saying clearly that rollout isn’t a lesser discipline than strategy. In many ways, it’s where strategy is stress-tested. A merger effectively brings together two content ecosystems, each shaped by different histories and working habits. Integrating those materials into a single, coherent identity requires judgement, creativity and a deep understanding of how legal marketing teams actually function.
A new brand can look impressive on launch day. But its credibility is built (or eroded) in the everyday documents clients see: pitches, proposals, reports and presentations. The firms that treat rollout as seriously as they treat brand strategy are the ones that embed change properly rather than just announcing it.
Because the rebrand is the headline. The rollout is what makes it real.
