Dentons Brand Guidelines: The 2013 Three-Way Merger Built as a Swiss Verein

London, Paris, Chicago and Canada under one roof.

Dentons is young as a firm and old in its parts. English Wikipedia dates it to March 2013, when three law firms joined: SNR Denton, the Paris-born Salans and the Canadian firm Fraser Milner Casgrain. The three announced the plan on 11 November 2012, their partners ratified it on 28 November 2012, and the new firm began operating on 28 March 2013. It took its name from the oldest strand. Denton Hall was a City of London practice founded by Samuel Denton in 1788, and Wilde Sapte, its later partner, went back to 1785, when Thomas Wilde and Samuel Archer Hussey set up in practice.

The British firms came together first. Denton Hall and Wilde Sapte merged in 2000 to form Denton Wilde Sapte. That firm then joined the Chicago practice Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, which Edward Sonnenschein and partners had opened in 1906; the merger was completed on 30 September 2010 and created SNR Denton. Salans had a different story. Wikipedia says it was founded in Paris in 1978 by two American lawyers, Carl Salans and Jeffrey Herzfeld, and a French lawyer, Eliane Heilbronn, and that in 1991 it became the first Western law firm to enter Russia. In October 1997 it bought a London firm, Harris Rosenblatt & Kramer, which Wikipedia says made it the first Continental firm to practise English law, and on 1 January 1999 it completed a merger with the New York firm Christy & Viener. Through the 2000s it added offices in Central and Eastern Europe, Germany and Spain.

The 2013 firm was built as a Swiss verein, an association called the Dentons Group that does not itself give legal advice. Its member firms include Dentons Canada LLP, Dentons Europe LLP, Dentons UK and Middle East LLP and Dentons US LLP. Wikipedia says the firm has no headquarters, with senior leaders based mainly in London, New York and Washington, D.C., and that London is its largest office by number of lawyers.

A firm that grows by joining others.

Dentons calls its mergers “combinations,” and it made many of them after 2013. The largest was with Dacheng, a Chinese law firm that Legal Cheek described in January 2015 as China’s biggest domestic practice. Wikipedia says the two firms announced the combination on 26 January 2015 and completed it in November 2015. In Chinese the firm went by 大成, Dacheng’s name, and elsewhere by Dentons, with a logo that set the Chinese and English names side by side. The same year Dentons US merged with McKenna Long & Aldridge of Atlanta, and the firm launched Nextlaw Labs, a business accelerator for legal technology.

More local firms joined over the following years. Wikipedia lists Rodyk & Davidson in Singapore in April 2016, Gadens in Australia and Papua New Guinea in December 2016, the Scottish firm Maclay Murray & Spens in 2017, and Dentons Lee in Seoul in 2019. Later additions included firms in Nigeria, Tunisia, Vietnam, the Philippines and India, and in October 2024 four firms across Africa. Many keep a local name next to Dentons, such as Dentons Lee in Seoul and Dentons Muñoz in Central America.

Some ties ended. In March 2022, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Dentons announced that its Moscow and St Petersburg offices would become independent firms, Legal Cheek reported in April 2022. In August 2023 the firm ended its combination with Dacheng, which now runs on its own as Beijing Dacheng Law Offices and acts as Dentons’ preferred firm in mainland China, according to Wikipedia. Dentons’ Hong Kong practice stayed in the group, and the firm now uses a different Chinese name, 德同.

How 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.

One name across many member firms.

Size has been part of how Dentons is described. In March 2022 Legal Cheek counted it among the largest law firms anywhere by size. The firm itself says, in a November 2026 release reported by Canadian Lawyer, that it works from more than 175 locations in over 85 countries. In the same month its Global Management Committee named new leaders for nine global practices, from corporate and M&A to disputes, real estate and tax, a framework the firm says is meant to make it more consistent for clients across that network.

The verein shapes the brand. Under it, member firms such as Dentons Canada and Dentons US are separate legal entities that share one name, and when the Dacheng combination ended in 2023 the Chinese name changed while the English one stayed. The firm has also built businesses outside law: Dentons Global Advisors, launched in June 2021 as an advisory arm, was renamed DGA Group in June 2024, Wikipedia says. In June 2025 Dentons announced a partnership with the Canadian AI company AXL to develop legal tools.

For a design guide, Dentons shows how a single short name can carry a network of firms that keep their own local identities. Compare Baker McKenzie and DLA Piper, two other global law firms. For this guide we use a deep plum, ink and stone with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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