Those long, long law firm names grow short&snappy

Now behold WilmerHale!

Note the edgy single-word name, the hip double capitalization, the three manageable syllables, the obvious pronunciation, the way it rolls off the tongue. It is everything law firm names historically have not been: innovative, savvy, bold. And short.

Beginning Oct. 1, WilmerHale will become the so-called market name of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, the law firm formed by last year's merger of Hale and Dorr, one of Boston's most venerable firms, and Wilmer Cutler Pickering, a Washington firm of similar stature. The longer name will still appear in ads and correspondence, but WilmerHale will effectively become the firm's new name, used on signs, in e-mail, and by receptionists answering the phone.

A growing number of law firms nationwide are shrinking their lengthy rosters of stodgy-sounding surnames to names that are quicker, livelier, and help establish an identity. That means experimenting with unorthodox slashes and hyphens rather than traditional ''ands" and ampersands. It can mean eliminating commas and, as with WilmerHale, spaces. Above all, it means reducing the partner names on a shingle to a select few, and sometimes only one.

Fueled by a heated scramble for top clients, renaming is one of a litany of sophisticated marketing techniques long common in the corporate world but only recently embraced by the legal industry.

''The general rule is that law firms are dropping names and shortening them to become like corporate brand names, like Coca-Cola," said Stephen Barrett, a law firm marketing consultant. ''Everybody wants to have a nice, clean, crisp, contemporary name instead of one that sounds like it was designed out of copper plate type fonts in 1877, which might be great if your only practice is old, Yankee, WASPy money, but for every other purpose only tells the world that you're behind the times."

For example, Pittsburgh-based Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Nicholson Graham, a national firm with a Boston office, now goes by the shorthand K&L, adopted after the firm went through a ''branding and positioning exercise" several years ago, according to Clara Boza, the firm's chief marketing officer. Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe, based in San Francisco, uses simply Orrick and launched a marketing campaign that centers on the letter O.

The Boston-based firm Choate, Hall & Stewart now refers to itself widely as Choate. Greenberg Traurig, a Florida-based firm with an office in Boston, was previously Greenberg Traurig Hoffman Lipoff Rosen & Quentel.

One firm that runs counter to the shortening trend is DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary, which morphed out of a series of name changes after the mergers of several firms, including Piper & Marbury; Rudnick & Wolfe; Piper Marbury Rudnick & Wolfe; Gray, Cary, Ware & Freidenrich; Piper Rudnick; and Dibb Lupton Alsop, later known as DLA.

Renaming can be expensive, time-consuming, and involve titanic struggles over pride and ego. Convincing longtime partners that it is for the firm's greater good that their names be dropped is rarely a smooth process.

''It's difficult to have founded a successful firm and be the unfortunate third or fourth or fifth name and really want your name to remain in the list," said Burkey Belser of Greenfield/Belser, a brand design firm that works primarily for law firms. ''You don't want to see your name lost when you've spent your career building the firm's reputation, and that's reasonable."

Merry Neitlich of Extreme Marketing, a marketing consulting firm, said she knows of two national firms at which partners whose names were dropped from the shingle hoarded leftover stationery that bore their names and continued to use it until their supplies ran out. When some attorneys at Baker & Botts, a firm established in Texas that now has offices around the world, were unhappy with the decision five years ago to become Baker Botts, Belser's firm had paper clips made in the shape of an ampersand and gave one to every member ''so they could keep the ampersand if they wanted to," he said.

Law firm names are regulated by rules of professional conduct that differ by state, and the American Bar Association issues model rules. In Massachusetts, firms may retain the names of deceased or retired members, which are often kept as a tribute to their families. Names of well-known partners, dead or alive, are frequently preserved because they carry strong name recognition. Renaming is also guided by research showing that people typically remember only two or three syllables -- not two or three names, Belser said.

After the merger that created Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, the firm blended all five names to signify a partnership of equals. But many people, including some of the firm's own lawyers and clients, considered it too long and came up with shortened versions. Co-managing partner William F. Lee said the firm originally intended to go public with WilmerHale last summer, but when Lloyd N. Cutler and John H. Pickering died in short succession earlier this year, the rollout was delayed out of respect.

''Research, both internal and external, showed that Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr was a long, cumbersome name, so you have to strike the right balance," said Rich Rico, founding partner of The Via Group, a Portland, Maine-based marketing and communications agency that helped coin the name WilmerHale. ''So we've come up with a market name for those instances when you want shorthand, and kept the longer name because of the long history, legacy, and heritage of that firm."

''You have to have something people can refer to as shorthand when they're talking about you," added Lee. ''The advantage of the longer name is that we never lose our history and meaning. The advantage of the shorter one is it's easier to say."

Sacha Pfeiffer can be reached at pfeiffer@globe.com.