From 2021 until December 2024, the logo of Barbarian Law® was a Bitcoin and a Litecoin. The orange B and the grey L sat side by side over the firm name, and if you squinted it looked like a credit card company was sponsoring a law firm. I designed it myself on Canva, where both symbols sat in the Pro library at the time, and I chose the parts deliberately. Nobody knows who owns Bitcoin, so I knew I would not get sued for using its logo, and it is free to use commercially. I checked the Litecoin licence for commercial use as well, then decided it was safe to combine the two into something new. The layout was borrowed as well. The Mastercard logo looked like a Venn diagram, which I liked conceptually, and I understood that Mastercard could not own the idea of a Venn diagram. It all fit the advice a strategy professor at Schulich once gave me: do not reinvent the wheel, take something that already exists, change it a little, and you can sell it again (the same professor called Tim Hortons and McDonald’s money printing machines, so I was inclined to listen). This month we went back through the archives to compare it with the crest we use today, and since most firms only ever show the finished product, we thought we would show the reasoning instead. (The grain on the archive footage above is original, which makes the old logo look suitably prehistoric.)

The process was not glamorous. We put the two logos side by side with the help of our AI assistant and scored them on the things that matter to a business: who owns it, what it tells a stranger, whether it survives being shrunk to 16 pixels in a browser tab, and whether it still works in one colour on a photocopied closing document.

The old logo won more rounds than I expected. It was memorable, arguably the only law firm logo in York Region that ever started a conversation, and the B and L pun fit our line about art meeting corporate interest. It was also two flat circles, therefore it stayed legible at any size.

In the 16 pixel test the old logo beat the crest comfortably, which is the one result that still bothers me.

However, a logo is a signal, and the economics of a signal depend on exclusivity. The Bitcoin symbol is free for anyone in the world to use, which is the whole point of Bitcoin, and it is also exactly why it cannot do the job of a trademark. A mark has value because it points to one source. If anyone can put the same B on a coffee shop, an exchange or a hoodie, the marginal value of that B as an identifier of a law firm in Aurora is essentially zero. The arrangement was mine, but the symbols came out of Canva’s library on a non-exclusive licence, the same one every other Canva user gets, so I could never stop anyone else from using them. That is the part my strategy professor left out.

There are really three intellectual property questions hiding in a logo, and the old one struggled with all of them. The first is distinctiveness. Under the Trademarks Act a mark has to actually distinguish your services from everyone else’s, and a symbol the whole world is free to use distinguishes nobody. The second is confusion. I was right that nobody can own a Venn diagram. However, the confusion test looks at, among other things, the degree of resemblance between two marks as an ordinary consumer would see them, and two circles side by side over a brand name is a layout Mastercard has spent decades teaching people to read as Mastercard. Our services are nowhere near payments, which helps, but a famous mark tends to get a wider berth than an ordinary one. The third is copyright, which is separate from trademark and catches a lot of business owners. The person who draws the logo is the first owner of the copyright unless they are your employee, and an assignment has to be in writing. If a freelancer designed your logo and all you have is a paid invoice, you may own less than you think.

The second problem was what it said about the work. Barbarian Law® closes real estate deals, incorporates companies, drafts contracts and prepares wills. The logo told a first-time home buyer that we were a crypto firm, and it tied our reputation to whatever the price of Bitcoin did that week (not a risk-adjusted position for a law firm).

The crest fixes the ownership problem first. It is original artwork: a barbarian whose moustache holds the scales of justice and whose beard is a pen nib, which is the name of the firm, the law and the drafting in one figure. It was designed by a firm I hired, and I own the intellectual property in it, which is the point about paperwork above put into practice. It is not perfect. Scales of justice are on half the law firm signs in Ontario, the fine detail turns to mush at small sizes, and it takes a second look to see the face, where the old one took none.

We are not the first to go through this, and the closer comparison for us is a basketball team. The Toronto Raptors arrived in 1995 with a red dinosaur on a purple badge, two years after Jurassic Park. It was of its moment in the same way a Bitcoin logo was of 2021. Purple left the primary logo for the 2008-09 season, and in 2015 the dinosaur itself was retired for a basketball with claw marks. The old look never really went away, however. The team’s 30th-season logo in 2024 was drawn in the old-school purple, and the dinosaur still turns up on throwback jerseys. An NBA team also runs more than one mark at a time: a primary logo, a secondary, a wordmark and a set of alternate colours, all recognizably the same club. That is how we treat the crest.

For a business owner, the takeaway is the same question we raise on an incorporation. Before you fall in love with a name or a logo, ask whether you can own it. A clever mark built on somebody else’s symbol is a lease, and the landlord can be the entire internet.

The verdict is that the crest stays.

The old logo keeps one win, the small sizes, so the next project is a simple BL monogram for the browser tab. It will be ready… any minute now. As for the Bitcoin logo, it may yet return as a throwback (Hardwood Classics, law firm edition).

Visit barbarianlaw.ca to book a consultation on your incorporation or business purchase.

Where Art Meets Corporate Interest.

This post is general information, not legal advice.