When finance director David McLaughlin decided to join the legal profession, he wasn't going to do things by half. He joined first Linklaters, and then Simmons & Simmons, two of the largest UK law firms, at a time of rapid change.

By Caroline Poynton

Tell me a little more about your career so far. In particular, what convinced you to join the legal profession?
I’d spent ten years – to 1991 – in the auditing area with management consultancy Touche Roche. It got to the point where I was amid a bubble of senior managers just waiting to move up to partner, and I had to decide whether that was the career step I wanted to take. Instead, I decided to try something new and moved to a paper company, Arjo Wiggins. The company had recently demerged and then remerged with a French group. There was no group infrastructure and so I was given the task of implementing some structure – for example, group reporting.  I found it really interesting work for about six years. But I wasn’t particularly fond of the company location in Basingstoke and started to look into other areas including the telecoms industry and law. I was attracted to the legal profession because it seemed to combine high-octane intelligence with working closely with the owners of the business.

I first joined Linklaters, which I have to admit was a little daunting at first. It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with it, but at the time, the global systems I had hoped for were just not in place. However, the HR director, who actually interviewed me for the role, was a fantastic guy and he was able to dispel many of my concerns. He wanted to bring in good professionals who could really make a difference and bring in best practices from outside industry. And for seven years, it proved to be a really good and exciting challenge.

Law firms are still in many ways catching up with world-class corporates but you have to remember that the corporates are massive. They have the advantage of huge support teams at their disposal. However, there are bonuses to working in law firms too – the smaller size means there’s often more opportunity to be open minded about opportunities and there’s greater room for flexibility. For example, at Linklaters, I had the opportunity to be involved in a huge project moving the firm from its practice-management system (PMS) to SAP’s enterprise-resource-management system (ERP). We needed a system that clearly worked for business – but could be adapted to a professional services environment and then to lawyers. It took a year’s work to prepare the ground work and, in a way, it was a brave step as no other law firm had done it before. But we did very good due-diligence work and we knew it was the right choice.

I am proud to have played a critical role in the process. The project was managed by Simon Thompson, who is now COO at the firm. But I was in effect the customer, in terms of specifying what we needed and why.

Why did you decide to leave Linklaters to join Simmons & Simmons?
Well, it was a career choice really. I needed to take the next step on the ladder.  I’d been number two at Linklaters and I had the opportunity of becoming number one at Simmons and Simmons. I also had some strong views on how I wanted to structure a finance team – to split it between transactional and advisory work. And I wanted the opportunity to put these ideas into action.

Now that you’ve worked for two law firms, what are your views on working in a legal environment?
Are law firms really that different to other businesses? Yes, the partners, of course, own the business. But in other companies, just because the managers don’t own the company, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t act like they do. In fact, in a corporate, the position of authority is the main driver, and the environment can, in fact, seem a lot harder or nastier. In a law firm, on the other hand, that hierarchy isn’t so evident. Instead you’re striving to be on an intellectual par with the partners, who are all very clever. But if you can convince them of your ideas, they’re much more likely to let you get on and do it.

Of course, the other side of this is that you have to understand how lawyers tick and communicate in their language. As a finance professional dealing with very intelligent lawyers, it can be easy to assume prior knowledge, for example. A lot of lawyers are very happy with numbers but they don’t always understand the detail. You need to convert what you’re trying to do into their language. It’s a delicate balance because you need to show you’re confident and that you know what you’re doing, while being patient and sensitive to lawyers’ needs. You sometimes need to know when to step back too. There have been times when the firm has been going through so many change processes that the partners have just not been in the right place to take on board one of my ideas. I have then needed to be resilient enough to go away, but with a view to perhaps raising the idea once more at a later date. Sometimes you’ll win, sometimes you’ll lose, but I love the fact that I’ve been able to get so involved and that there is such a strategic element to the role.

You mentioned splitting your finance team between transactional and advisory work? Can you explain this a little further?
At Simmons & Simmons, we’ve built a bit more structure into the team – there’s a lot more clarity over what people do. In particular, I have worked on dividing teams into, on one side, transactional processes and, on the other side, advisory services. It’s easy for those to be mixed up but I really don’t believe that works because different skill sets are required for each area. The idea of somebody who processes bills in the morning, manages expenses at lunch and then deals with strategic issues in the afternoon – well, it just doesn’t work. Say you have a finance team of five – you might decide to split it so that two manage the transactional processes, and three take advisory roles. But that may then raise questions about location – you may decide, as you expand the transactional team, for example, that the location isn’t right and the transactional team would benefit from being centralised elsewhere. It’s all about getting the right balance and getting the right people with the right skill sets (and mind sets) in the right team. There are also different salaries required of each role – by splitting the team, my aim is to be more efficient and spend less on the transaction side so that, although I will be spending more on the advisory roles, the overall costs of finance are reduced.

How do you go about building a finance team?
When I worked at Linklaters, it was a period of enormous change – there were about 50 people at the start, and then around 30 left within 18 months. We then recruited about 50-80 people. One of the requirements we had at the time was that we would not recruit anyone with a law firm background who might have been trained in what we saw as some poor practices in the legal profession of the time. We wanted to recruit from other walks of life and that seemed to really work. When I joined Simmons & Simmons in May 2005, eight people from my Linklaters team ended up following me to my new firm. It was an unintentional bonus to building my new team here, but it also made the process easier for me.

What have you found the greatest challenge of recruiting and retaining your team members?
Well, I don’t have a problem convincing people that they will have great and challenging career opportunities in a firm like this one. But I suppose in terms of moving between law firms, it was a delicate process. I was concerned that the existing Simmons & Simmons team would see my old Linklaters’ colleagues joining and worry that it was some kind of Linklaters’ implant. They might have also worried that my arrival at the firm would spell a ruthless period in which I would move people out very quickly. But I gave everyone a chance and I worked hard to dispel any concerns. I’m now very proud of the people we have here and think there’s a great balance in the team.

What are you most proud of in your career so far?
In terms of a project I was involved in, it has to be the SAP implementation at Linklaters. That really was a great experience. From Simmons & Simmons, I’ve been delighted to work with managing partner Mark Dawkins, identifying areas in which we can help improve profitability, and then putting those ideas into practice. And just generally, I am really proud of the team who work for me and I am very open in sharing with them information and ideas; I like to get people involved. That meant that when I left Linklaters, I didn’t leave a gaping hole behind me. Everyone had the information and knowledge they needed to carry on without me. And I have that same ethos with the people that now work for me at Simmons & Simmons.

If there was one thing you could change about your career so far, what would it be?
I stayed at Touche Roche and Arjo Wiggins for too long, when I should have thought about my career and moved on. I have to remember that with my staff; much as I want to keep them all, they need to think about their careers and move onwards if the opportunities arise. That inevitably means that I will lose good people from time to time, but such is life. ?

David McLaughlin is finance director at Simmons & Simmons. He can be contacted at david.mclaughlin@simmons-simmons.com