Growing Fast Without Losing What Matters

And just sort of thinking about somebody coming into law from outside law, on balance, you know, have you seen that as sort of actually it's a big plus? You know, I see things in a different way, or is it sort of been, oh, it's really been an uphill struggle?

Well, I mean, we're putting, I guess, the proposition that non-lawyers can be useful to law firms for their tests in a very large way.

So I can't conclude yet, I think, whether that will ultimately be successful.

I mean, clearly, I guess there are some factors that I would highlight.

So firstly, there's a huge amount you don't know.

And so I am not engaged, nor would I ever want to be, on the legal matters that my colleagues wrestle with every day.

And we have some of the best lawyers lawyers in our industry who are terrifically strong in doing that.

I do think that one of the features of Fletcher's actually before I joined was that they had already moved to what I might describe as a kind of professional management team with non-lawyers involved and lawyers or former lawyers who are now in management roles.

And so I was coming into a practice with terrific legal capability, but also a business that had gone through some of the transition to running itself more like a successful and growing professional services business.

I hope I can add some value to that process, but I was lucky in the sense that I wasn't necessarily having to prove the case for having non-lawyers involved in that way.

And the original founders that I mentioned earlier, Rob and then Ed Fletcher, had were already quite strong believers in the need to run law firms more like a professional business.

And in particular, the transition, which actually Ed Fletcher made personally, from stopping his client work and moving to be, in his case, a chief executive with a full agenda, but outside of client work.

And that's a transition that we've seen some of the acquisitions that we've made or colleagues in the acquisitions that we've made go through.

It's still a very live discussion point in the industry, but it would be true to say that whoever is in charge of our various legal departments and increasingly right down into sort of individual offices, our model is to have been dedicated to the business of running law firms, not to providing client service directly.

And that is a real thing to give up as well, because there's a huge amount of passion and energy and purpose that comes with serving clients directly that my colleagues who choose to go into those leadership roles have to give up.

And we think that's the right model, but that's certainly not what every law firm chooses to do.

One of the things that you've used running a business and leadership, without going back and looking at the transcript, I wouldn't know, but I don't recall the word managing coming up all that much.

And is that a deliberate choice? Is management a bad word? How do you manage professionals?

Well, I don't think it's a bad word at all.

And look, I mean, I think there are a number of different aspects of leadership that as a sort of senior team we try to provide.

But one distinction we do make is to separate apart what I might call performance management with the management of change.

And we have quite deliberately chosen to put in place a a rhythm and a routine and a set of metrics and language around making sure that we deliver our performance objectives, which are everything primarily from our client service objective, how we manage our people, how we are delivering against our compliance obligations, as well as our financial obligations.

from the management to have changed because over the period that I've been describing, certainly the period that I've been enrolled, we changed an awful lot about the practice as well in both operational terms and in terms of our opposition to colleagues and in terms of the breadth of services that we offer.

But I don't think of management as a bad word.

I certainly think of it as a very good one.