Profile - Claire Hafner

With a CV that includes an amusement park and a brewery as a place of work, it is clear that Claire Hafner has certainly had some of the more unusual jobs in finance. A move to pre-launch Disneyland Paris saw Hafner and her team testing out the park’s rides on a Friday afternoon (to distinguish between moveable and immoveable fixtures and fittings), and her role with Guinness involved travelling to the Seychelles and Africa as the brewery stepped up its M&A activity. Via BT and then Barclays, Hafner then found herself being headhunted by Eversheds to help steer the firm’s move to become a highly client-focused and commercial business.
So what did Eversheds hope Hafner would bring? “There was a vision of moving Eversheds forwards while maintaining the ‘great place to work’ ethic. The person they were looking for would drive that change and would not be afraid of changing the status quo – and would be very straight with them,” she adds.
This is where her experience at BT in its professional-services division came in. Hafner was working with some of the company’s technical elite to make the division into a highly profitable entity within three years. “The challenge was driving the change very quickly, and making sure everybody was excited by the same vision,” says Hafner.
In the time she has been with Eversheds, profits have risen by 15 per cent each year, while partner profitability has also seen a 20-per-cent year-on-year increase. This has obviously been extremely rewarding for Hafner: “No doubt about it, market conditions have been good but I think people at Eversheds were ready for the challenge and they have taken it.”
The key to driving such change is communication, says Hafner. But this is also one of the biggest hurdles: “We have done so much in the past two years as a management team and it was so important that it was communicated well. There has been huge momentum but you need to listen to different views, tailor your approach, and ensure everyone is being taken on, and participates in, the journey.”
Lawyers have, in the past, not been known for being commercially minded – was this a challenge for Hafner? She believes that, by and large, no: “I arrived at Eversheds at a time when the firm wanted to accelerate the pace of change, so it wasn’t hard in that respect. But sometimes you have to put your point across quite strongly and explain the rationale. Lawyers are very logical and if you have a good argument then they will buy into it; if you can’t argue your case you are on the road to nowhere.”

Utilising technology
The past few years have also seen the firm investing heavily in technology and looking at how it can best be utilised to enhance its service offering to clients. Hafner has, for example, been involved with the implementation of Eversheds’ £10m project-management strategy, which gives clients more transparency of the work undertaken and greater predictability of costs. “It is a huge selling point for us and we have won a lot of key global clients on the back of that,” says Hafner. “When we use it customer satisfaction shoots up. Clients like to know what a project is going to look like in terms of time, what the costs will be, and be informed on a regular basis.”
Hafner has further ambitions in this area. Her eight years at BT have stood her in good stead in this respect and the fact that the IT department reports into her has helped enormously because so much of what finance does is IT related, she points out. “The IT director and I work very closely to drive through slicker systems, slicker reporting, and slicker management information. Ideally we want to have real-time information. We’re not there yet but we have to be ahead of the game on this – certainly with e-billing, as our clients are asking for much more real-time availability of the work that has been done to date and want to receive their bills online.”
A big issue for Hafner has been in balancing major investment with increasing profitability – a challenge for a growing firm that has already seen a major office move this year, with another in the pipeline. The Leeds office has just moved to Bridgewater Place, the city’s tallest building, and next year the firm will open its global headquarters in London’s EC2. “It’s important we provide a world-class working environment for our people, as well as our clients, and as growing our London presence is key to our strategy, this investment is vital for our future plans,” says Hafner.

War for talent
Implementing structures around pay and reward has also been a key area for Hafner, as the ‘war for talent’ takes hold within the legal industry. Her work included moving the firm away from a full lockstep to a performance-based system.
She adds that the finance department has to be more flexible than it might want to be when it comes to attracting and retaining talent. “You have, for instance, to sometimes give people recruiting specialist expertise into the firm the benefit of the doubt, even if the business case isn’t exactly spot on, because of their gut feeling about the person they are looking to recruit they will tell you it is the right move to make. We have been recruiting aggressively in some areas to support our growth and sometimes attracting the best talent requires flexibility.”
Her ambition for Eversheds, which currently has 32 offices in cities across the UK, Europe, Middle East and Asia, is to see the firm receive the recognition she believes it deserves. “I’d love to see the changes we are driving through crystallised at the end of the firm’s three-year plan and feel that I was part of that,” she says. “And I want us to be properly recognised – we are a great firm and we’re not always recognised as much as we should be. We just need to show we are top notch.”
As to what challenges the future holds for her, Hafner reckons it will be keeping up with the changing legal landscape. “So much is changing with the Legal Services Bill and Clementi – all of that is going to have an impact on what the legal environment looks like. A lot of firms will consolidate, a lot of alliances will be formed, and they’ll be ever changing alliances especially internationally. So keeping track of all that makes a law firm more and more similar to the corporate world. In my case, it will be like being the FD of a FTSE 250 or borderline 100 company.”

Career moves
Although Hafner has evidently achieved a lot in her career, it was never her ambition to work in this field. “If I’d been told as a child that I would be an accountant then I’d have died,” she says. However, she has never looked back on her career choice: “As I keep telling my teenage kids it was the best move I could have made.”
After studying English and Economics at the Sorbonne, Hafner moved to the UK and did a chartered accountancy exam at what was then Arthur Young. “I was very fortunate to have been chosen. I was a bit of an oddball in that I was half English, half French and I was 25 as opposed to the average joining age of 21. I knew it was an incredible break.”
She is also quite unique as one of only a few women at finance-director level in the legal industry. When she joined Eversheds in 2005, there were just seven female finance heads among the top-50 firms in the UK. Hafner suggests this is a similar to the situation in FTSE 250 companies. “It is still hard for women overall in business to crack the glass ceiling, but I have never felt being a woman was a handicap,” she says. She admits, though, that it will always be that bit more difficult for women, who traditionally have to take career breaks for children. While Eversheds has a high proportion of female partners – its last round of promotions saw a 50/50 split across its associates – Hafner says it is crucial firms do what they can when it comes to flexible working. “Eversheds has a flexible working policy and it makes commercial sense to do that,” says Hafner. “One of my team has just gone to have a baby – she is a top-notch employee and we will take her back whether she’s working two or three days at home, or whatever; we don’t want to lose her.”
Things have worked out well for Hafner in her career, as she herself concedes. But what is it about her job that keeps her happy? “Although you hold the purse strings and you do have to be feared a little bit by your colleagues, it doesn’t mean you can’t be liked or enjoy your work. It has offered me a huge amount of opportunity. A lot of people don’t enjoy their work, but I’m still enjoying mine so something must be right.”