Helping a major U.S Law firm rethink its ESG market strategy
The recent focus on ESG has created a significant need for legal counsel to help companies and funds navigate the fast-moving, ESG-related regulatory and disclosure landscape. One Athlon law firm client needed to reposition its ESG practice to keep pace with these rapid market developments and asked us to conduct a comprehensive competitive audit of how its competitors, as well as other global professional services firms, were positioning their ESG capabilities.
Athlon researched which firms should be included in the audit (expanding the original list from the client) and then produced a report that examined more than a dozen firms for their messaging, partnerships, thought leadership and other signs of market presence, highlighting particularly innovative strategies. The report included a list of detailed findings and recommendations to help guide the firm in its own ESG market strategy.
Athlon then interviewed the firm’s leaders across various practices to identify an architecture for its ESG capabilities that aligned with client needs, and then generated all necessary web copy to introduce the firm’s comprehensive ESG practice.
Building an online platform for a U.S.-China law firm alliance
When an AmLaw100 firm embarked on a strategic partnership with a Chinese law firm to offer comprehensive legal solutions for western multinationals doing business in China and Chinese multinational doing business in the west, the two firms turned to Athlon for an online platform to publicize the alliance and raise the profile of the two firms in each other’s home market.
Athlon designed and built a clean, contemporary site for the alliance, including all computer coding and image selection, as well as creating content where necessary. The site includes attorney profiles, practice descriptions, articles, events, firm news and offices, and is scalable to keep pace with the alliance’s growth. Numerous coding challenges were overcome to meet the clients’ functionality requirements, and Athlon worked closely with the team in China so that the site would be fully functional in Chinese. After the site was completed, Athlon designed user acceptance tests so that internal audiences in both countries could test the site on laptops and mobile and any final fixes could be made before launch. Finally, Athlon conducted an accessibility audit to identify where the site content would need to be modified so that the site would meet accepted accessibility standards.
Notably, the site was built on open source rather than proprietary platforms. Because of this, once the site was completed, Athlon was able to train the alliance’s marketing team to maintain the content themselves, while transferring hosting of the site to a global hosting provider. This enabled the alliance to maintain the site internally at much lower cost than is usually the case.
Helping a major U.S. law firm get the recognition it deserves
Industry awards are particularly important in the hyper-competitive legal industry. Because many firms have impressive matters they can use in their awards nominations, the quality of the award nomination packet is important in differentiating nominees. Crafting good award nominations, however, is particularly challenging, because it requires identifying the legal obstacles the firm overcame in its matters and telling the story in a compelling way, while being technically accurate and maintaining confidentiality where necessary. Drop-dead nomination deadlines require impeccable project management.
An AmLaw 50 firm turned to Athlon for help with its awards submissions. Athlon drew on its unique ability to engage senior partners on a peer-to-peer level regarding matters ranging from international arbitration to private equity fund formation. With Athlon’s help, the firm has been strongly represented each year across the awards spectrum, including the Law360 Rising Stars, Practice Group of the Year and MVP awards, and awards administered by The American Lawyer, The Deal and Bloomberg Law.
Bringing a signature global report on corporate risk into the 21st century
When one of the world’s leading corporate risk consulting firms realized its signature report on corporate risk had fallen significantly out of step with the rapidly changing risk landscape, it called Athlon for help. To completely rethink this global project, Athlon did the following:
Interviewed a half-dozen members of the firm's senior management to get their perspectives on the report, and then put together a presentation for repositioning the report to align with modern risks, from reputational risk to geopolitical risk.
Designed the online survey and worked with the research company fielding it.
Conducted the statistical analysis and extracted key findings (global, and by region and industry).
Interviewed three dozen consultants around the world on country and industry trends and for eight articles exploring various risk issues.
Wrote all the text of the 128-page report and developed compelling ways of presenting ideas through schematics and models.
Developed the design brief and worked extensively with the design team.
Oversaw the copyediting process and proofing galleys.
The result was a report that dramatically brought the survey into the 21st century and that was enthusiastically received by the managing directors who used it for business development.
Helping a major Canadian bank understand its innovation trajectory
One of Canada’s largest banks, with operations around the world, had made a concerted effort over several years to move beyond its conservative history to embrace fintech and establish a culture of innovation. Under the leadership of one of the bank’s vice chairmen, the bank undertook a string of acquisitions, established university partnerships and created in-house innovation centers. After all this activity, however, the vice chairman felt there was no coherent narrative of what had been accomplished that could be used when communicating with employees, investors and other constituencies.
Athlon was asked to create a confidential, internal document that would provide that narrative. To do so, we interviewed nearly a dozen business unit leaders and other key decision makers involved in the bank’s transformation. From these interviews, we drafted a 6,000-word document that comprehensively detailed the past, present and future of the bank’s innovation trajectory, along with schematic models to help illustrate that trajectory and how the bank’s innovation initiatives intersected with the larger, global organization. We also drafted an introductory letter to the report from the bank’s CEO.
The report, finished just in time for the bank’s annual investor day, enabled the vice chairman to confidently communicate the bank’s innovation story to a wide range of constituencies.