Voicu & Filipescu
A discreet "plus" sign for the Business Catalyst
Voicu & Filipescu was founded in Bucharest in 2001, when Daniel Voicu and Mugur Filipescu took over the Romanian office of the American firm Arent Fox and set out under their own name, keeping an affiliation with Squire Sanders & Dempsey, then one of the largest law firms in the United States. The ambition was first-tier: a young firm intent on standing alongside practices with decades of accumulated reputation, in a legal market growing fast toward maturity. The obstacle was structural. In Romanian law, nearly every conventional route to differentiation was closed: the bar’s statute severely restricts publicity and forbids comparative claims; every firm carries its founders’ names and professes the same virtues — ethics, excellence, hard work; and narrowing to a specialty would have capped opportunity in a market still expanding. The question the partners faced was a business question: how does a young firm build a first-tier reputation in a category whose rules forbid the usual tools for earning one?
Brandient started from what a law firm actually sells. Legal counsel is a service, and in services the brand is delivered by people — every engagement stands or falls on the person handling it, which makes branding a management strategy, not a marketing tactic. Rather than dress up generic claims, Brandient deduced three attributes from how the firm genuinely operates — the creativity to see beyond the letter of the law and make the impossible possible; a constructive, deal-making spirit that favors action over reaction; and durable client relationships built on listening and trust.
Those attributes resolved into a single, category-defying positioning: the Business Catalyst. Legal counsel was recast not as a passive, risk-averse advisory but as an active force that moves clients’ deals and growth forward — like a catalyst, accelerating the reaction without being consumed by it, its effect visible only in the result. The positioning rested deliberately on the firm’s intrinsic attributes — the one axis of differentiation the category’s rules left open. And because a service brand lives in its people, the strategy came with an organizational prescription: use the brand idea as a decision filter and build it into the firm’s culture and internal communication.
The identity reduced the idea to its simplest possible form — a discreet "plus" sign, read at once as added value, positive outcomes, and the move to a new stage of development. From that single mark Brandient generated a complete visual language — a family of patterns and illustrations, a restrained palette of corporate blue and cool gray, a single accent of red reserved for "Attorneys at Law" — carried across a full corporate-identity program engineered to read as the work of a market leader within the sobriety the category demands. The mark is cited in LogoLounge Master Library 4 (2012).
The firm grew into the stature the brand claimed, ranking among Romania’s top ten law firms by turnover and reputation, absorbing part of a competitor practice in 2008 and adding tax and insolvency arms to become a group. The most telling proof is durability: in 2023, when the firm became Voicu & Asociații following Mugur Filipescu’s retirement, its own announcement committed to preserving the firm’s core values — "creativity, constructive spirit and long-term relationship" — the same three attributes Brandient had deduced eighteen years earlier. The positioning did not decorate the firm; it became its permanent self-definition.
Client:
Voicu & Filipescu
Industry:
Professional Services
Project type:
Rebranding — Brand Repositioning
Date:
2006
Services:
Brand Positioning
Logo and Visual Identity Program
Corporate ID Program
Other featured projects
News radar
Join the Brandient community! Stay in the loop with innovative branding insights, exclusive design content, and inspiring case studies.
Stay in touch with Aneta's latest opinions — articles, interviews, and podcasts — on entrepreneurship, marketing, branding pioneering, leadership, and culturally meaningful current events.
Brandient Radar is a select and non-intrusive, low-volume newsletter.
Follow our flight path — sign up for our Radar newsletter today!
get in touch
Client? contact us
5 Mendeleev Street, 3rd floor,
Bucharest 010361
Expert? Join Us
Are you brimming with talent and unshaken by challenges? Then, consider this your invitation to join our elite team, dive into complex problems, and have the opportunity to see your work make a mark far and wide.
Please submit your cover letter and relevant credentials:
Click to e-mail Brandient Careers.
friend? follow us
Copyright © Brandient 2002–2026. All Rights Reserved.