A startup lawyer's brand, built to be owned

Dr. Szabo Andras is a startup lawyer with real depth: seven years on both the founder and investor sides of venture deals, a university lecturer in corporate and VC law, and a researcher in innovation law. What he did not have was a brand. He looked young in a field that trades on gravitas, read as indistinguishable from the navy-and-gold lawyer cliche, and wanted something a firm could grow into and he could eventually step back from, not a personal cult built around his name.

We built the firm's brand from the ground up. Positioning came first: a startup lawyer who works entrepreneur-to-entrepreneur, fluent on both sides of the table and transparent on price, speaking to founders and investors as separate audiences. Then the identity, built to be distinctive on purpose: a colour palette that our research found no other startup-law brand in the region owned, an open-door 'D' as the mark, and a mascot as a signature the firm owns rather than the person. We packaged the whole system into a brand book that doubles as an operating manual, with an index linking every editable template, and built the template stack around it: a presentation template, business cards, letterhead, a Word template, an email signature and social templates, all in the new brand and voice. And as the main deliverable we designed on top a trilingual site structure, in English, Hungarian and German, that we developed and handed over fully finished.