Clifford Chance Brand Guidelines: Coward Chance, Clifford-Turner and a 1987 London Merger

Two London firms and one 1987 merger.

Clifford Chance was created in 1987 by the merger of two London law firms, Coward Chance and Clifford-Turner, Wikipedia says. The older of the two traced its roots to a practice set up in 1802 by Anthony Brown, which advised British companies trading overseas as the empire grew. Clifford-Turner was founded in 1900 by Harry Clifford Turner, with offices on Gresham Street in the City of London.

Clifford-Turner’s early clients included the Dunlop Rubber Company and Imperial Airways, and in 1929 it advised on the creation of the John Lewis Partnership, according to Wikipedia. After the Second World War it advised the Labour government on the nationalisation of several privately owned industries. It looked abroad well before the merger, opening offices in Paris in 1961, Amsterdam in 1972, Madrid in 1980 and New York in 1986.

Wikipedia notes that neither firm had been in the first rank of London practices, but that their combination has since been said to have changed the shape and profile of law firms in London and around the world. The firm’s own story was told in a history by Judy Slinn, Clifford Chance: Its Origins and Development, published by Granta Editions in 1993.

Europe, the United States and Asia.

The merged firm grew quickly. Over its first decade it expanded its practices across Europe and Asia and more than doubled in size, and in 1992 it became, in Wikipedia’s words, the first major non-US firm to practise US law.

The largest step came in 1999, when Clifford Chance merged with the Frankfurt firm Pünder, Volhard, Weber & Axster and with Rogers & Wells, a US firm dating from 1871. The predecessor names were kept for the German and US offices until 2003, when they were dropped in favour of the single Clifford Chance name. The sources used for this guide do not say how the German predecessor firm fared between 1933 and 1945.

Not every move lasted. A California practice set up in 2002 with nearly 50 lawyers from the disbanding firm Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison was closed in 2007. Elsewhere the map kept widening: local-law practice in Japan after restrictions on foreign firms eased in 2005; Australia in May 2011, through two boutique firms in Sydney and Perth; a Casablanca office in February 2012; and, in July 2012, permission from South Korea’s Ministry of Justice to open an office there, which Wikipedia describes as a first for a UK firm. In May 2018 it announced a delivery and innovation hub in Singapore to serve the Asia-Pacific region.

The firm was also reshaped by the late-2000s recession. Before 2008 its main focus was banks and the financial sector, Wikipedia says; in 2009 it announced redundancies among lawyers and support staff in London, and in 2011 it moved back-office work to a Global Shared Service Centre, including a knowledge centre in New Delhi. In February 2018, after the liquidation of the construction and services group Carillion, around 60 staff from Carillion’s Newcastle legal services arm joined the firm.

The firm also helped shape shared market documents. With Allen & Overy, it prepared the Loan Market Association’s recommended syndicated loan agreements in 1999, giving lenders and borrowers a common form to adapt, according to Wikipedia’s article on A&O Shearman.

How the 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 Magic Circle name, by the reporters’ definition.

Clifford Chance is generally considered one of the five London firms known as the Magic Circle, an informal label that Wikipedia says was coined by legal reporters in the 1990s, alongside A&O Shearman, Freshfields, Linklaters and Slaughter and May. The label is not fixed: in 2013 The Lawyer argued that Clifford Chance and Slaughter and May should no longer be counted in it, while other commentators continue to include them. The term followed an older informal grouping, the Club of Nine, whose members kept an informal no-poaching agreement and whose senior partners met to share information; Clifford Chance was one of the nine, and the club was disbanded in 2000, Wikipedia says.

Today the firm says on its website that it has more than 2,800 lawyers in 34 offices across 22 countries. The site is organised around expertise, sectors and insights, with blogs, a client portal and pages on responsible business and on community and pro bono work; the firm says a code guides its commitments on professional and ethical standards, its people, the environment and the communities where it works. Alongside client news, the site carries topic hubs such as a Financial Markets Toolkit and a Talking Tech insights series, and a careers section that presents working at the firm as demanding but supported, with colleagues working “as one team across borders and disciplines.” In November 2026 the partnership re-elected its senior partner for a second four-year term, Pulse 2.0 reported on 5 November.

For a design guide, Clifford Chance shows how a merger can settle into one restrained name: it keeps a surname from each predecessor and, since 2003, a single brand across its regional offices. Compare A&O Shearman, whose predecessor worked with it on the 1999 loan documents, and Linklaters, another London firm. For this guide we use a deep navy, a slate grey and a soft stone with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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