Profile: Coffin Mew LLP’s new CEO

Feature

posted 28 Oct 2009 in Volume 4 Issue 1

Coffin Mew LLP’s new CEO

Vincent Denham talks to Joanna Lee about the past, present and future.

Talk me through your background and how you came to work with the legal profession?

By profession, I was, for 18 years, a retail banker working in the building society industry.

Working with the legal profession really stems from a discrete project that I did as an independent consultant for Hammond Suddards, as they then were. I spoke with some of their key clients about what they did or didn’t like about the service that they received from their particular partner or department. I presented those views to the management board and it effectively blew all their perceptions out of the water. They thought what was important to the client was the legal work, when in fact it was returning phone calls, transparency on costs, internal organisation, understanding the clients’ needs and their businesses as well as they do, which, and bear in mind this was 1991, just hadn’t been thought of in law firms. I have always felt that, in terms of a law firm, the experience that the client has is more (or at least as) important as what they are buying from you.

So that got me into the legal profession. As a business manager I was fascinated by the challenge of working with opinionated, intelligent and bright people who just didn’t get it!

As part of that Hammonds project, I had a group of partners in a room and I asked them, to define ‘client care’. Unsurprisingly they viewed it as the ‘legal’ stuff – putting in long hours, being aggressive with the other side and fighting their client’s corner and so on. The clients didn’t mention any of those things. You are expected to be on the client’s side, you are expected to fight their case. They are not impressed when you do all the things they are expecting you to do – what they are impressed with is you going the extra mile and delivering outstanding service.

Fast-forwarding a few years, what I have done since pretty much revolves around not so much encouraging lawyers to be businessmen, but getting them to recognise that it’s not the ‘best’ lawyers that make the most money – it’s those that have the life skills and ability to translate legal knowledge into a commercial context. Also, recognising that the overall experience is what is going to shape the client’s opinion and future decisions as to which firm to use.

To elaborate, I believe that the law is a commodity. There is nothing that most firms are doing generally that can’t be done cheaper by firm. Even truly creative work, once completed, is then replicable by others. So the way that the firm undertakes the work, and the way that the client feels after the transaction has been completed, is at least as important as the quality of the legal work itself – it’s probably even greater. The legal work is a given – the most important thing is the box that it all comes in.

How hard did you find it to convert lawyers to that way of thinking?

I think I’m still trying! The success I have had is with those willing participants in the change process who recognised the need to develop their presentation, marketing and client skills. I tend not to use the words ‘selling’ and ‘marketing’ because they often frighten lawyers off – but effectively that is what it is needed, recognising that they have to listen as well as speak and understand client needs in a way that they haven’t been trained to at law school.

Is there a marked difference in receptiveness dependent on seniority?

It’s wrong to say I don’t find a difference, but it’s also fair to say that I know people who are very junior lawyers who act as old men in terms of their outlook and how they respond, while also finding the opposite to be true. It’s not to do with age or seniority but the person and how they view the world. For example, my role prior to this was as chief executive at St John’s Chambers in Bristol, which was probably a bigger challenge emotionally than that of a law firm. I found it hard getting some people to even carry a mobile phone with them, yet there were others who have iphones and are all geared up for receiving information while they are in court, looking at their diary in real-time and responding to requests on the go.

There are those who want to embrace change and others who don’t, and I don’t think it’s a function of age, experience or level within the business.

Tell me about your role at St. John’s Chambers.

I was at St. John’s just shy of five years. I started as the CEO and the brief was to create a step-change in performance. There were around 60 self-employed individuals in chambers, and change was needed to reflect the same kind of changes that law firms had been going through. If law firms have changed over the past ten years due to client demands, value for money, accountability and service standards, then, in turn, law firms have started to put pressure on the Bar to do the same thing. My task was to get them to realise that their future was at risk if they didn’t start thinking more like those who instructed them. And we were hugely successful in terms of business growth – we moved from old traditional barrister premises to the top floor of a modern block in central Bristol. We looked more like a law firm than chambers with proper meetings rooms, videoconferencing, audiovisual equipment all wirelessly networked, and so on. I even got them into open plan!

What made you take the leap from chambers to a law firm?

There was no conscious decision to move back to a law firm. In general terms, I have tended to work as a CEO in organisations that have been at the start of their journey, and also to be the first ‘non-lawyer’ working in chambers or a law firm. The first CEO always has a shelf life – there is a limit to the extent that you can push people to change without starting to build up a degree of resistance. To begin with, some of the more obvious things provoke the more difficult conversations. A second CEO can often have more success in his first three months than the first CEO has in a year, because a lot of the groundwork has already been done. This has been borne out wherever I have worked.

After around four to five years, you’ve probably reached the stage where both you and the firm would benefit from a change of scenery and a different set of challenges.

You are the first CEO at Coffin Mew LLP – what prompted the creation of the role and also the scrapping of the managing partner role?

First, there’s a great deal of latent potential in the firm that wasn’t being developed effectively and so a recognition that the business was not performing as it was capable of doing and so some professional management would help. Second – succession. Nick Gross, who has been the managing partner for an interim period of about a year, took the job knowing there was going to be a CEO appointed, and before that Pauline Johnson had been doing the job for 16 years. So there wasn’t really anyone at the firm who was a natural or willing successor. So a number of things came together – performance, succession and the opportunities presented by the Legal Services Act 2007 – that made the firm look for outside management. It was an opportunity both for me and the firm.

I get the biggest challenge and excitement from looking back at just how much progress can be made in small incremental steps, and even though I may be a little impatient for a faster change, I certainly get a lot of satisfaction out of enabling people to see the alternatives.

For example, management reporting in law firms tends always to be about the financials. My plan here is to focus on performance. We produce the usual accounts at the end of the month – that tells us little about how the business is performing against objectives or how we are managing our resources. Worse, it tells us little about the competition or client satisfaction individual.

How has the integration process been and what are your main priorities?

We’re still in the integration process. I started in July, and Nick is looking to me to pick things up and I’m looking to him to let things go. At the moment, I’m just in the middle of coming up with the first proposals for restructuring the business groups and then for aligning our governance behind them. Then we’ll look at how we present ourselves to the market so that people can better understand where we see our strengths and where we see the opportunities.

With regards to priorities, first is probably ensuring that our internal organisation makes sense in the eyes of the client and then making sure that client work is carried out by the right people working at the right level in the firm. Then, we must ensure that we identify our key clients and strengthen our existing relationships.

How would you see the firm’s growth strategy in the next few years?

I’d like us to be bigger, through both acquisition and natural growth, and I would like us to be more focused on our strengths. I’d also like to improve our financial performance so that we are at a level that is more comparable with other firms that we admire. I would like to focus on improving all levels of performance. Ultimately, the firm needs to be more responsive to client needs and the demands of the market.

What are the biggest challenges the firm faces over coming years?

For all law firms the costs of compliance and regulation are becoming increasingly burdensome – scale is therefore very important.

I’m not blind to the fact that we could well be a target from a predator, so we must be agile and make ourselves stronger.

It must be an exciting time to take up this role?

It’s not going to be boring! That’s the challenge of being first in the job – it’s never the same. Yes it’s a law firm, yes they are all broadly similar, but they all have different personalities and that’s why there is a choice and why people come to us rather than one of our competitors. We need to understand that and understand our clients better than we do.

We also need to tackle the holy grail of cross-selling, which is something that even the best firms are still pretty bad at. Partners need to be less proprietorial about their client relationships and be much more open about introducing their colleagues and looking at the client as a consumer of legal services rather than simply (say) a corporate client – we want to get more of their overall legal spend, but how we do that is the challenge.

How do feel as a non-lawyer in the legal profession?

When I first worked at Hammond Suddards, I was in the privileged position of having access to the FDs and MDs of some pretty big companies, and they told me word for word what they wanted me to feed back to the partners. When I did that there was, among some of the partners, a sharp intake of breath and they asked: “Are you a lawyer?” “Well, no.” “That’s alright then.” And they sat back, arms folded, thinking they didn’t have to listen to me because I couldn’t possibly understand their business, and only remained there because the managing partner said they had to. It was the only time I ever needed to explain my credentials and say, “here is why you should listen to me – and you might actually learn something”. In any other industry I have worked in, people have been willing to take me at face value.

I understand law firms. I know what the performance drivers are; it’s just that the names, the environment and the clients are different. Other than that it’s pretty much the same anywhere. Like it or not, it’s a commodity business – lots of suppliers, lots of choice, varying prices – it’s a question of how the client is made to feel by each firm. If they think of you as cheap then they will come to you for things they need cheaply, but the minute they want something more valuable they will go elsewhere – and here at Coffin Mew LLP, I want to make sure that clients come to us for everything.