Motto® rebrands Ivo around ‘Intelligence by Design’ for legal tech

The Brand Identity: Ivo’s CEO Min-Kyu Jung once wrote an internal manifesto about the long tail of development – how the team logs as many hours as needed to fix a single bug and will raise a ticket for issues that other companies wouldn’t even classify as problems. Their obsession with craft shaped the product, and then the brief for the branding. When Motto®, the strategic firm known for creating what it calls Ideas Worth Rallying Around®, came on board, the contract intelligence platform was already winning 85% of competitive trials and had earned the trust of companies like Shopify, Uber, Atlassian, Reddit and Canva.

The brand, though, still reflected an earlier chapter. Ivo was founded by an attorney who experienced firsthand how manual, fragmented contract workflows slow down business, introduce risk and drain legal teams. The company built a platform that streamlines contract review and surfaces business insights from entire libraries of agreements.

As it moved upmarket into larger funding conversations and enterprise deals, the distance between the maturity of the product and the way it presented itself became the strategic problem Motto® was asked to solve. Before touching anything visual, the team went deep into legal as a category and into the mindset of its buyers. General counsels are among the most risk-averse decision-makers in any industry. They evaluate accuracy, control and trust within seconds.

Through focused leadership workshops and competitive analysis, Motto® uncovered a gap in the market: competitors were selling automation, while Ivo had built embedded intelligence designed specifically for in-house enterprise teams. “Ivo is not positioning itself as another AI tool or a traditional CLM,” explains Sunny Bonnell, Co-Founder & CEO of Motto®. “They are pioneering ‘Contract Intelligence,’ reframing contracts from static documents into dynamic sources of business intelligence.” That distinction gave the strategy its centre of gravity.

The Idea Worth Rallying Around® became ‘Intelligence by Design,’ a phrase drawn from the company’s own culture – the manifesto, obsessive bug-logging and commitment to perfectionism. “Once this big idea was defined, we developed verbal and visual work in lockstep so they complemented one another very well,” Bonnell shares.

“Voice, messaging, typography, symbol and interaction design were all shaped by the same principles, each interpreting it through a different medium.” Three messaging pillars followed: Craft and Excellence, Speed and Delight, and Strategic Intelligence. From the strategy, a creative concept emerged that Motto® calls “Power to Express.” The thinking is that when intelligence is designed well, it creates the conditions for expression – giving legal teams the clarity and confidence to operate at a higher level.

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The rebranding of Ivo by Motto® is significant as it addresses a niche market in legal tech with a unique positioning strategy, making it relevant and impactful for brand strategy professionals.