Prepared privately for Renaissance Legal

Philip, thirty-five years of this work, and your name is on almost none of it.

I looked you up the way one of your families would. Quietly, probably late, long before anyone picks up the phone. What I found stopped me. Thirty-five years, a Child Trust Fund fight that went all the way to the Lords, and hardly a word of it in your own voice.

Have a coffee with Liana →

Twenty minutes with Liana. Unhurried, and no deck.

Your homepage today. Warm, capable, clearly good at the work, with your name kept off the front of it.

What a buyer sees first

Everyone vouches for you, on someone else’s page

Chambers puts you near the top of your field. So does Legal 500. There is Child Trust Fund campaign work that ended up in front of the House of Lords. Every bit of that proof sits on a page someone else owns: a directory, a ranking, a news write-up. Your own blog, the one place that is yours, goes out under the firm’s name.

So when a family sits down to choose who to trust with something this personal, they meet the credentials and the kind words, and they never quite meet you. The person who earned all of it doesn’t get to say a thing.

Where your field is standing

Read three of your rivals and they blur into one

Open the other private-client firms a family is weighing you against and the words settle into the same handful: trusted, approachable, specialist, peace of mind. They are on your site too, and on everyone else’s, so by the third firm nobody is really reading them.

The one thing none of them can copy is you. A named founder, thirty-five years in, who took a Child Trust Fund fight to the Lords, saying in plain words what he’d want his own family to know. Nobody can lift that off you.

If I did one thing first

If I did one thing first, I’d get the Child Trust Fund fight and the thirty-five years into your own voice, this month, before anything else.

One place that is yours, with your name on it, quietly doing the work while you get on with the clients.

The thinking behind this

The whole idea, in ten minutes

Liana Fricker and me, talking through how a firm gets chosen before it is ever in the room.

Who you would speak to

Two people, one system

I make the stuff that does the talking. The videos, the writing, your actual voice on a page. Liana works out what to build first, and why. A short call with her maps the whole thing to your firm, with no commitment on either side.

Kevan Smith, Creative Lead · Liana Fricker, Strategic Lead · Epiphany Content

Kevan Smith and Liana Fricker, Epiphany Content

A short conversation

Worth twenty minutes?

If any of this rings true, the next step is a coffee with Liana. Nothing formal. She will tell you straight whether there is something here worth building for Renaissance Legal, or whether there isn’t.

Have a coffee with Liana →

Liana is keeping a few of these conversations open for September.

Yours either way

Have the conversation and the full written version of this teardown is yours to keep, the one you can forward to your partners. It stands on its own whether or not we ever work together.

Not ready to talk yet? See the whole picture first.