Objective

Kennedys is an international law firm whose insurance division sells expertise. Expertise is invisible until it is published, which makes the report the product and the design of the report a commercial decision rather than a cosmetic one.

The firm wanted to be the voice the market turned to on the issues about to reshape it: civil justice reform, Brexit, and the technologies that were going to make existing liability law incoherent. That is a position you cannot assert. You have to publish your way into it, repeatedly, over years.

Creative response

Design and publication across a standing thought-leadership programme: identity guidelines, the report series, briefing formats and the campaign assets cut from them. The research, the media work and the lobbying sat with other functions on the same account; the published artefacts came through the design, digital and creative function.

• A briefing series, not a document. KEN.LAW. Briefing: Key Legislation flyers, built as a reissuable format so the firm could publish again each time legislation moved, rather than commissioning a new design every time
• The Kennedys Brexit Report, produced in the immediate post-referendum period, and a second report on Brexit's impact on the insurance sector
• Identity guidelines, a documented standard for the firm, with concepts dated 5 May 2016 and an asset library behind the briefing series
• The autonomous vehicles report, 2019. A global campaign across the US, the UK, China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Australia, covering driverless technology on road, rail, aviation and maritime, research written up as a report and syndicated into marketing assets for online and offline distribution
• A mixed-method evidence base. Quantitative research on households alongside in-depth qualitative interviews with opinion formers and senior executives, so the reports argued from data rather than from opinion

Designing the briefing as a format rather than an artefact is the decision that made the programme possible. A law firm in 2016 could not know which legislation would move next; what it could know was that something would, and often. A template that a partner can fill and publish inside a news cycle is worth more than a beautiful one-off that takes three weeks to reproduce.

The autonomous vehicles campaign is the same logic at scale. Six territories and four transport modes is not four reports and a translation budget; it is one argument, designed once, cut into the assets each market needs. The design system is what makes a single research programme behave like a global campaign.

• A briefing series, not a document. KEN.LAW. Briefing: Key Legislation flyers, built as a reissuable format so the firm could publish again each time legislation moved, rather than commissioning a new design every time
• The Kennedys Brexit Report, produced in the immediate post-referendum period, and a second report on Brexit's impact on the insurance sector
• Identity guidelines, a documented standard for the firm, with concepts dated 5 May 2016 and an asset library behind the briefing series
• The autonomous vehicles report, 2019. A global campaign across the US, the UK, China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Australia, covering driverless technology on road, rail, aviation and maritime, research written up as a report and syndicated into marketing assets for online and offline distribution
• A mixed-method evidence base. Quantitative research on households alongside in-depth qualitative interviews with opinion formers and senior executives, so the reports argued from data rather than from opinion

Results

• Over 2,000 clients received the Brexit reports directly, alongside distribution through marketing events and roundtable dinners
• An amendment to the LASPO Act 2012, the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act, came out of the lobbying campaign the reports supported. The lobbying was public affairs work; the reports were the platform it argued from
• Extensive coverage in national and insurance trade press for the thought leadership programme, with the autonomous vehicles findings placed in target outlets
• Social distribution above industry benchmarks on earned channels for the autonomous vehicles report
• Deeper client engagement and new business won, the stated commercial purpose of the programme, and the reason it ran for years rather than once

LAS, Act amended following the campaign the reports supported

The work