About the Client: J Sawyer Consulting
J Sawyer Consulting is a litigation support firm providing life care planning, vocational evaluations, and expert testimony for attorneys handling complex, high-stakes cases.
Hummingbird Creative Group partnered with J Sawyer Consulting to refine their brand strategy and visual identity for professional services in litigation support. This case study highlights how professional services branding, strategic messaging, and design helped establish credibility, build trust with attorneys, and reinforce J Sawyer Consulting’s position as a go-to expert resource.
Life care planning and vocational evaluations often involve catastrophic injuries or disputed earning capacity. In these high-stakes cases, the work has to withstand challenges from every angle. That’s why attorneys turn to experts they trust.
Julie Sawyer-Little is one of those experts. A licensed occupational therapist and certified life care planner, Sawyer-Little founded J Sawyer Consulting in 1998 to deliver expert testimony, comprehensive life care plans, and vocational assessments that help attorneys build strong, evidence-based cases.
Branding Challenges for Professional Services Firms
Like many professional services firms built on expertise and referrals, J Sawyer Consulting had a strong reputation—but its brand and online presence didn’t fully reflect the credibility, rigor, and trust required in litigation support.
This is a common challenge in high-trust professional services, where deep expertise exists but the brand hasn’t evolved to match the sophistication of the work.
The Way Forward on Familiar Ground
For her, it was a natural next step in a world she’d grown up in. With a dad in academia, Sawyer-Little had an inside view of life care planning and forensic consultation from an early age. She grew up learning from him and even helping him on cases at times. It was much later, when life took an unexpected turn, that she decided to hang up the corporate career hat and go out on her own.
“I’d just been laid off from my previous job,” Sawyer-Little explains. “At that point, I felt like it was an opportunity to expand and start my own business.”
Sawyer-Little found the work both interesting and challenging at once, mainly because every case is different. It also pulled all her degrees together — the undergraduate studies in occupational therapy and the master’s in rehabilitation counseling.
“It allowed me to integrate all my experience and all my education,” she says. “I found it interesting to meet people and look at strategies on cases, to get an understanding of what’s going on with people — with the goal to provide a report or product that’s going to improve their quality of life and increase their independence.”
And that’s her why: Making the lives of others better and giving them the opportunity to gain more independence.
Letting the Evidence Lead
It’s quite a reason to get up and go to work every day. And a compelling reason is especially helpful in the early days of business when you’re still figuring things out.
One of the early challenges for Sawyer-Little was understanding client expectations and defining her role in the process. “Transparency is a big thing, even today,” she says. “I learned that early on. Let’s say it’s a case where the expectation is that I’m going to come in and recommend 24-hour care in someone’s home, and that’s going to bring them a really high dollar amount for damages. But the medical evidence and the fact patterns don’t support that. I want to be very clear and transparent about what I think the potential outcome is going to look like.”
Over time, she’s learned to be very clear with referral sources as to what she can and can’t do, or what the result is going to be based on the evidence and the information they have.
Seeing Cases from All Sides
And that’s just one of many lessons learned over nearly three decades in business. “I tend to get more complex cases now than I did before, which I really like,” Sawyer-Little adds. “I’m able to because of my experience. Because I do both defense and plaintiff work, I analyze cases from a different lens.”
When she’s working on a case with a plaintiff attorney, in the back of her head, she’s always thinking, “If I were a defense attorney, how would I attack them? What’s the evidence? Is there anything in the records, or anything that’s going to be a red flag that we need to deal with so that we don’t have that come up later?”
Experience gives her that insight and the ability to look at the case from all angles so she can anticipate what it’s going to look like.
Knowing the Limits
Over the past 10 years, the company’s felt more like a business than in the early years. Early on, Sawyer-Little did social security vocational work to cover her household budget. Any hours she had left would be spent on case work like she does now. Today, case work is her entire focus.
And while she has the most flexibility in her schedule that she’s ever had, she’s also very aware of her desire to grow the business, to see the income continuing to go up, and to have the referral base continuing to rise while still maintaining the quality of work she’s known for.
“The challenge is balancing the volume while managing growth,” she says. “Meaning managing how much work I can do, and then how much can I offset to my administrative assistant? Can I send some of it to one of my contract nurses, or do I need to sub out something else? Trying to balance all that while growing, so that I’m meeting the referral sources’ needs. Nothing’s worse than taking a case and not being able to get the product done within the time frame. And I have to be very cognizant of that.”
Standing Out in a Sea of Sameness
Showing concern about timeliness and transparency is not unusual for this expert with a reputation for balanced, impartial analysis. It’s part of what makes her unique in her industry.
“My approach is pretty direct and conservative in nature, which is sometimes met with resistance,” Sawyer-Little explains. “But I’m balanced as far as opinions. With almost an equal amount of plaintiff and defense work, I do a pretty good job of remaining objective, regardless of who retains me.”
Sawyer-Little’s goal is to give her clients a consistent experience, with an organized, efficient process and timeline. And she has a strong bent toward quality. She wants customers to see J Sawyer Consulting as work that can stand up to scrutiny at every stage of litigation.
She describes her vision for the result as “a well put-together product, objective in nature. A great foundation for the litigation arena.”
“That means it’s going to stand the testing of the trial and depositions,” she explains. “It’s going to hold up in the court of law, and it’s going to be a product they can rely on and use in the negotiation process.”
Our Approach: Brand Strategy & Identity for Professional Services
Hummingbird Creative Group partnered with J Sawyer Consulting to deliver a brand strategy for professional services that aligned the firm’s visual identity and messaging with its evidence-based, impartial approach to litigation support.
Translating Expertise Into a Professional Brand
The strategy focused on credibility-focused branding—ensuring every visual and verbal touchpoint reflected the rigor, objectivity, and defensibility required in legal services branding and consulting environments.
Branding That Reflects Reputation
This is a message that’s conveyed through J Sawyer Consulting’s branding as well, but that wasn’t always the case. While Sawyer-Little was building a solid reputation for trust that has consistently earned her repeated word-of-mouth referrals, her early online presence didn’t reflect that same level of credibility.
As J Sawyer Consulting continued expanding its reach, Sawyer-Little knew it was important to change that. In collaboration with Hummingbird Creative Group, the firm clarified its brand positioning as a trusted litigation partner—centering the story on the founder’s dual expertise as a clinician and forensic consultant. Brand strategy led to an updated visual brand identity alongside marketing collateral that strengthens awareness and increases loyalty.
Results: Strengthened Credibility & Trust
Today, the J Sawyer Consulting brand stands as a reflection of the practice behind it: organized, defensible, and strong enough to support attorneys when the stakes are at their highest.
The refreshed brand helps attorneys quickly understand J Sawyer Consulting’s value, reinforces confidence in expert testimony, and supports trust throughout the litigation process.
Why This Matters for Professional Services Firms
For professional services firms, particularly in legal services, consulting, and expertise-driven fields, branding isn’t about visibility alone. It’s about trust.
This case study demonstrates how an expertise-driven brand strategy helps professional services firms:
- Build credibility with sophisticated decision-makers
- Differentiate in referral-based industries
- Align reputation with brand identity
- Support high-stakes, high-scrutiny work
Editor’s Note
J Sawyer Consulting partnered with Hummingbird Creative Group on brand strategy, identity, awareness, and loyalty to ensure its public presence reflects its nearly 30 years of litigation support experience. The collaboration focused on translating Julie Sawyer-Little’s impartial, evidence-based approach into clear storytelling and design tailored for attorneys and legal professionals.
Read the full branding case study → Your Partner in Case Strategy: J Sawyer Consulting