5 questions with Peter Wright

We spoke to Digital Law’s Managing Director, Peter Wright about the company’s rebrand and their pioneering work in the digital legal sector.

What can you tell us about Digital Law?

Digital Law launched in 2013 without any clients or resources behind us; we’ve been successfully building the firm ever since. We’re a law firm with a very specific niche. We advise on what we call digital legal issues — everything from law and compliance around websites to ecommerce, data protection, cyber security and social media law. We also cover licensing around software, open source, terms and conditions, privacy policies — and of course, GDPR.

Classically, lawyers are not comfortable with technology. At Digital Law, part of our work is advising law firms on what they need to do as part of a quickly evolving sector — which includes complying with their own regulatory standards from both a technical and digital perspective.

Why did you choose to work with Herron?

We came to Paul and his team at Herron for two things: our website and our brand.

Digital Law’s initial branding and website had been designed by a different agency. We had received feedback over the years from both clients and other businesses that our website didn’t reflect what we offered, or our level of expertise.

What else were you looking to improve?

We wanted to improve the consistency and clarity of our branding — and online presence, in general — across all our social media channels, including our Twitter account, LinkedIn and Facebook pages. The information, visuals and messaging we had about Digital Law didn’t match up, which has having a negative impact on how potential clients saw us as a business. We were also concerned about the responsiveness of our website. We knew that it was important that clients could access information about us from whatever smartphone or tablet they happened to be using.

What was the design process like?

We spent quite a bit of time with Paul and his team. We even had him in the room while on a couple of conference calls with our clients, so that he could get an in-depth perspective on the work that we do. By spending so much quality time with our team at Digital Law, Paul was able to develop a strong vision for the new branding. He even helped us come up with our tagline: a digital law firm tech and law firms trust.

Paul also worked very closely with the team to ensure that our website complied with all the legal and regulatory standards that it needed to meet. We know from experience how many agencies and law firms aren’t aware of these standards. It was a big priority for us that the design of the website could accommodate legal elements like the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) badge.

In what other ways is Digital Law a leader in the sector?

We frequently speak at conferences and events; it takes us to lots of different places around the world. Besides my role as the Managing Director for Digital Law, I’m the former chair of the Technology and Law Committee of the Law Society of England and Wales as well as the elected chair of the Policy and Regulatory Affairs Committee. I help develop policies around legal technology — and the wider regulation of legal services as well.

I’ve actually been involved in a lot of the policy and lobbying work on regulations like GDPR, as well as legislation like the Investigatory Powers Act. The Investigatory Powers Act in particular resulted in a lot of issues around privacy and security; from a law perspective, we wanted to be able to protect things like legal professional privilege for our clients.

I continue to do a lot in that field for the Law Society. Just this year I chaired a discussion at a GDPR conference about the regulation one year on. I also presented a session on cybersecurity compliance — and the various measures you can take from a cybersecurity risk perspective to comply with GDPR.

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View the case study

Read about the rebranding process

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