Potter Clarkson is one of Europe's leading intellectual property law firms, specializing in patents, trademarks, designs, IP litigation, licensing and consultancy. Founded in 1889 and headquartered in Nottingham, the firm serves clients across diverse sectors including life sciences, pharmaceuticals, engineering, electronics, and consumer goods.
With over 200 specialists across seven offices in the UK and Scandinavia, Potter Clarkson advises some of the world's most innovative companies—from blue-chip enterprises like AstraZeneca and Unilever to rapidly growing startups. The firm is consistently recognized in top-tier rankings for its technical and legal expertise in protecting and defending intellectual property globally.
Potter Clarkson's small marketing team of just two people faced mounting pressure from across the business. Attorneys and business development teams consistently needed professionally designed materials—pitch documents, client proposals, brochures, and reports—but the volume of requests far exceeded the team's capacity.
For nearly a decade, the firm had relied on a design agency, but costs had become increasingly difficult to justify. The agency charged by the hour plus a 25% project management fee on every project, turning even simple template updates into expensive undertakings. A brochure refresh that already had an established template would cost £3,000 just to update images and content.
The team faced several interconnected challenges:
Prohibitive agency costs - Between hourly rates and project management fees, design expenses were spiraling, with the agency being based in the Midlands rather than even a premium London market
Slow turnaround times - Work needed to be "booked into the studio" days in advance, creating delays when attorneys needed urgent pitch materials for client opportunities
Quality control issues - Simple copy-paste errors in documents meant endless back-and-forth corrections, wasting valuable time without adding any design value
Doing work in-house - The marketing team had some Adobe InDesign and Illustrator skills, so they often handled design work themselves simply because it was faster and cheaper than involving the agency
Limited capacity for strategic work - With time consumed by reactive design requests and agency management, there was little bandwidth for proactive marketing initiatives
The firm considered hiring an in-house designer, but concerns about overhead costs, training requirements, holiday coverage, and maintaining brand control made this option unattractive. Potter Clarkson needed a solution that could handle the constant flow of attorney proposals, pitch documents, and marketing collateral without the expense or complexity of traditional agency relationships.
Potter Clarkson partners with Design Cloud on the Agency plan, providing them with a dedicated UK-based graphic designer who handles their document design, presentations, brochures, and day-to-day marketing collateral.
The cost transformation was immediate and dramatic. Instead of paying hourly rates plus 25% project management fees for every project, Potter Clarkson now pays a transparent flat monthly fee—with no hidden charges, no project management overhead, and no hourly billing surprises. The financial clarity alone represented a fundamental shift in how they could plan and allocate their marketing budget.
Design Cloud's dedicated designer model eliminated the consistency problems that plagued their agency relationship. Working with the same designer daily means Potter Clarkson's brand guidelines are thoroughly internalized rather than repeatedly referenced. The designer has developed genuine familiarity with their visual standards, document templates, and business context—knowledge that compounds with every project rather than resetting with each new brief.
The structured delivery process provides reliability that wasn't possible with their previous agency's studio booking system. Simple work like template updates or social content delivers within one business day, while complex documents like attorney proposals progress through daily updates until complete. This predictable rhythm allows the marketing team to confidently manage stakeholder expectations across the business rather than explaining unpredictable agency timelines.
The platform centralizes all design requests, eliminating the scattered email threads and lost attachments that characterized their agency workflow. Attorneys and marketing team members can submit briefs, track progress, and provide feedback in one organized dashboard rather than managing multiple email conversations and file transfers.
Most significantly, Design Cloud frees the marketing team from being an accidental design department. Instead of spending hours in InDesign creating materials themselves or managing complex agency relationships, they can focus on strategic marketing initiatives while knowing design deliverables are being handled professionally and consistently.
For specialized needs, the flexibility to scale provides options their agency relationship couldn't match. When Potter Clarkson launches their video editing and motion design service needs, they can add a video editor for just a single month to handle that specific workload, then return to their baseline graphic design capacity—providing enterprise-level resource flexibility without enterprise-level overhead or long-term commitments.
