Having made it this far you have probably also noted that we are sporting a brand-new name as well, one that we are all trying to get our minds around when answering the phone.

This is all part of the process we began months ago with our friends at Crew Marketing. Initially we imagined a simple update of our DIY website which quickly morphed into an expansive and creative exercise.

Led by the team at CREW Marketing Partners, we meandered through reminiscences of where we have come from as a firm and have done some soul-searching as to where we are at now, and where we are going, and it has been an interesting experience.

Starting with our new name, DLG Darnell Law Group. The firm has been known as Darnell & Co since 1995. We toyed with the idea of joining the current trend amongst law firms to re-brand under a generic name that doesn’t feature the names of the founder. What will happen, we mused, if Rebecca ever retires? By keeping her name as first on the masthead are we doing a disservice to the other lawyers in the firm, all gaining reputations in their own right, and destined someday, to carry on the firm?

In the end, we conceded that the firm’s reputation has been hard won over many years by Rebecca’s trojan efforts and her tenacity. As a team, we concluded it would be foolish to throw it away with for a catchy name change. Naming fashions come and go, but reputations are enduring, so we are proud to go forward under the slightly refreshed brand name of DLG Darnell Law Group.

The website flows from the new and improved name and identity. This is more than a high-tech version of the old Yellow Pages ad. To be truly effective our web site must accurately reflect the values of the firm and speak to the clients that we are best equipped to serve. A good website is not simply a huge drift net cast to indiscriminately capture any work that happens by, proclaiming the owners to be specialists or in everything. More usefully, to both our clients and ourselves, it needs to inform and educate as to who we are, and what we do, and more importantly what we do best.

We began with an examination of our core values, and while it may sound trite, we quickly concluded that doing the right thing, and getting the right results for our clients is why we get us out of bed in the morning and feeds our drive to go the extra mile late at night. Making a difference in our client’s lives, and bettering our community was a large part of why we became lawyers in the first place. The exercise was useful to reaffirm our commitment to our clients and to our community.

We then turned to our core competencies, in an effort to identify what we do best. We approached the task scientifically, regaling our friends at CREW with tales of famous victories from both the near and distant past, to illustrate our expertise. What emerged was a legacy of tenacity: our best successes have always come from acting boldly, confidently and with intensity. Fearless advocacy has been our path to success.

We wrestled with the mix of services we would showcase on the DLG site. There is a temptation to cast the net wide, since we are a general practice law firm and can do many areas of law, but in the end we came to the realization that we are, first and foremost, a family law firm. That is where we initially earned our reputation, and what we are known best for in the community, and so it is what we have chosen to highlight on our site, notwithstanding the depth of our practice in other areas.

Identifying our client base was another interesting exercise. When Rebecca first hung out her shingle as a newly called lawyer, she took pretty much everything that walked through the door, and she cut her teeth on legal aid files-some of the most difficult cases that ever come across a family lawyers’ desk.

Our clientele, has expanded and their family problems are now intertwined with business, corporate and property law issues sometimes multi-national in scope. We have increased our capacity and services to provide our clients with sophisticated business, tax and estate planning advice in addition to strong family law representation.

The team is growing. We now have five lawyers, one articled student is scheduled to start in the spring of 2020 and there are no less than a dozen full time professional support staff to make sure we meet the commitment to our clients to provide the best of the best.