A law firm asked an independent studio to make complexity exciting — and got stone, jazz, and Catalyst Blue
International law firm White & Case has unveiled a new identity from Uncommon Creative Studio, its first rebrand in 13 years — and the brief was not to look safer. According to Creative Review, the work was built around the idea of complexity: the firm handles intricate, high-stakes work, so instead of smoothing that over, the identity leans into it.
The old sans serif logotype is gone, replaced by a custom wordmark designed to look carved in ancient stone, drawing on Trajan’s Column and Roman bedrock typography. A monogram combines the firm’s initials with what the studio calls an “activated” ampersand, meant to celebrate global partnership. Imagery was made with a proprietary tool, Energy Studio, which turns photographs of people in motion into spotlit, kinetic vignettes and photographs of infrastructure into vertical streams of data. The palette is anchored by a vivid Catalyst Blue, offset by Marble White and Ink Black. A two-minute anchor film, The Power of Complexity, sets the system to an improvised jazz score.
“White & Case is a firm built for polycrisis,” said Lisa Smith, global chief design officer at Uncommon. “They are high-stakes gladiators who step into friction when everyone else backs away.”
Why it matters to independent teams: this is a case study in selling a point of view to a conservative client. The legal sector, as Smith puts it, is “drowning in navy blue slabs” — and the studio won the work by arguing that design is not decoration but force. For small studios pitching clients who default to safe, the lesson is that a sharp, defensible idea about what a client actually is can beat a prettier version of what everyone else already looks like. The rebrand also shows how a small team can productize its process: Energy Studio is not just a tool for this project, it is a repeatable capability the studio can sell again.
Source: Creative Review, “Energy drives Uncommon’s rebrand of White & Case” (30 October 2026).