Herbert Smith Freehills Brand Guidelines: An 1882 London Firm, Freehills & HSF Kramer

A London practice of 1882 and an Australian one built from the 1850s.

Herbert Smith Freehills is the name of a law firm formed on 1 October 2012, when the London firm Herbert Smith merged with the Australian firm Freehills. English Wikipedia describes the combined practice as headquartered in both London and Sydney. Since 1 June 2025 the firm has traded as Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer, shortened to HSF Kramer, after a merger with the New York firm Kramer Levin. This guide uses the Herbert Smith Freehills name for the 2012–2025 firm and HSF Kramer for the firm that trades today.

The London side is the older name in the title. English Wikipedia says the firm was established by Norman Herbert Smith in 1882 and was known by his full name until 1903. In the early twentieth century its specialities were company flotations and advice to mining companies; later its work widened into litigation, mergers and equity matters. Wikipedia credits it with advising on the merger of the Columbia Graphophone Company and the Gramophone Company, owner of the His Master’s Voice label, that formed EMI. Before 2012 Herbert Smith counted, by Wikipedia’s account, as a member of the “Silver Circle” of London firms. Until 2011 it ran a European alliance with the German firm Gleiss Lutz and the Benelux firm Stibbe; a planned merger of the three did not go ahead.

The Australian side was built from several nineteenth-century practices. Wikipedia traces Freehills to Clarke & Moule in Melbourne (1853), Stephen Henry Parker in Perth (1868), Bernard Austin Freehill in Sydney (1871) and John Nicholson in Perth (1896). It says predecessor firms hired Catholic and Jewish lawyers when many other firms would not, that Freehills was the first major Australian law firm to appoint a woman as a partner, and that it formed the first national law partnership in Australia. Wikipedia lists Freehills among the “Big Six” Australian law firms of its day.

One partnership, one profit pool, then a third name.

The 2012 merger was unusual in its structure. According to English Wikipedia, the two firms integrated financially from the start, in a single partnership and profit pool, rather than keeping separate finances under a shared name. The same account notes the friction this created: Herbert Smith paid partners on a lockstep scale based on seniority, while Freehills used a merit-based system and had more equity partners.

Growth after the merger was largely geographic. Wikipedia records a New York office opened in September 2012 for international dispute resolution, an office in Seoul in April 2013 and a third German office, in Düsseldorf, announced in November 2015. It says the Seoul and Tokyo offices are staffed by Commonwealth-qualified lawyers who do not practise local law, and that in Tokyo the firm relies on a referral arrangement with Japan’s large domestic firms. As of September 2020, Wikipedia counts 26 offices across Asia, Australia, Europe, North America and the Middle East. In February 2022 the firm’s Australian tax practice, Greenwoods & Herbert Smith Freehills, was sold to PwC.

The second merger brought the United States into the name. Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel, a New York firm founded in 1968, announced the combination with Herbert Smith Freehills in November 2024. English Wikipedia says the two partnerships voted in favour in April 2025 and that completion took place on 1 June 2025. Kramer Levin brought offices in New York, Washington, D.C., Silicon Valley and Paris. Writing in July 2026, Above the Law referred to the combined firm as HSF Kramer and reported that its first annual results since the merger launched in June 2025 covered the financial year ending 30 April. The same piece placed the deal early in a wave of transatlantic law-firm combinations.

How UK and global law firms present themselves.

Large UK and global law firms sell advice rather than objects, so their identities rest on names, words and a small number of visual constants. Many trade under founders’ surnames that have been shortened or combined through mergers, and the wordmark is usually set plainly, in one weight, with the colour doing quiet work: often a single accent, used sparingly against white, grey or a dark neutral.

The firm website carries most of the brand. A typical site is organised around expertise and sectors, with practice pages for areas such as finance, disputes or competition, and an office list or map that shows how many cities and countries the firm covers. Partner profiles, with photographs, practice areas and contact details, sit at the centre of the client-facing pages, because clients often choose a lawyer as much as a firm.

Firms also publish a steady stream of thought leadership: insights, briefings, blogs, webinars and seminars on regulation, markets and technology. Alongside these sit annual reports or results pages, statements on responsible business, inclusion and sustainability, and pro bono reports that describe unpaid work for charities and community groups. Graduate-recruitment pages, sometimes run as separate microsites, address law students with a different, warmer voice, while alumni networks keep former lawyers in touch.

The firms in this guide, many of them with long roots in London, share that vocabulary, but their histories differ: some go back to the eighteenth or nineteenth century, others are the products of mergers this century, and several now operate as international partnerships spanning dozens of countries. This guide sets out what can be checked about each one, from founding and mergers to how it presents itself today, and marks clearly what rests on the firm’s own word.

A three-part name, then a shorter one.

Law-firm names tend to accumulate, and this one shows the pattern clearly. A founder’s full name, Norman Herbert Smith, became Herbert Smith in 1903. The 2012 merger joined it to Freehills. The 2025 merger added Kramer, and the combined firm took the short form HSF Kramer. The older web address for Herbert Smith Freehills now forwards to the HSF Kramer site, so anyone looking for the 2012–2025 firm lands on the current one.

For a designer, the practical question with a name like this is how it behaves in small spaces: on a court filing, a deal announcement, a business card or a conference badge. Initials solve part of it, and the firm’s own move to HSF Kramer shows that route. A plain, well-spaced sans set in one dark colour can carry the full name where there is room, with a single accent used to mark sections rather than to compete with the words. None of the sources used for this guide documents the firm’s colours or typefaces, so the tones below are our own.

The firm’s history also gives a designer material that does not depend on a logo: two headquarters on opposite sides of the world, practices that began in Melbourne, Perth, Sydney and the City of London, and a third partner city, New York, added in 2025. A map, a timeline or a simple sequence of founding dates can tell that story without borrowing any mark.

For a design guide, Herbert Smith Freehills shows how a merged firm’s name can grow, shorten and still keep its history legible. Compare it with Clifford Chance, another large London firm, and Slaughter and May, which has kept its two founders’ names since 1889. For this guide we use harbour teal, deep ink, slate and warm stone with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Herbert Smith Freehills’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.