Profile: Neil Woodcock

Having just announced a 37 per cent increase in revenues for 2007, Salans is feeling justifiably pleased with itself, the result of 'marrying prudent judgement with an entrepreneurial spirit', it says. FD Legal talks to COO Neil Woodcock about the firm's financial rise.

BY TINA LOFTHOUSE

As Salans global chief operating officer, Neil Woodcock’s position spans finance, IT, marketing and human resources – he also performs an advisory role on strategic matters – a wide remit, indeed. But, rather modestly, Neil describes his function as “keeping the wheels on the wagon”.
Having joined Salans in 2003 after almost 30 years at PricewaterhouseCoopers, Woodcock has seen the firm double in size in terms of number of lawyers and offices, and, crucially, profits per equity partner.
“Of course, I’m not claiming the credit for the efforts of our hard working partners and associates, but I am proud to have played my part in our expansion,” he says. “We have embarked on a major growth strategy but, at the same time, we have ensured that the people we have brought in have integrated well.”
Where Woodcock has been instrumental is in striking that balance between investing in growth and maintaining the financial stability of the firm. “What the COO has to do is to help set the right tone. In our case the approach we take is that we want to be seen as innovators but against a background of financial prudence and to make sure the basic health of the international partnership is something that the partners can take as a given.”
One of the first things he was charged with was to ensure that all the operational aspects of the firm’s mergers were properly in place and that everyone had a good understanding of what the key performance indicators meant and the steps needed to achieve them.
Founded in Paris in 1978, Salans today is made up of 750 lawyers globally operating from 18 offices. Its Moscow office opened in 1991, along with offices in Warsaw, Prague, and Bratislava, and the firm went on to expand worldwide. Last year, Salans established offices in Budapest, Madrid and Barcelona, and tripled its capacity in Shanghai.

International outlook
Woodcock has four to five people who report directly to him – two in finance, a head of IT, a chief marketing officer and, coming shortly, the firm’s first global chief HR officer. There is no head office as such. Woodcock is based in London but the CFO and the global director of IT are in Paris.
This works well for the firm, Woodcock believes. No one culture dominates, and the rationale behind it is to offer clients a more geographically tailored approach with local lawyers who understand that country’s way of doing business as well as having a full grasp of local and international law. “We’re very much an international firm. This is the message we take to clients and so we try to practice what we preach in terms of how we organise ourselves.”
This means that the firm has people with global responsibility but with specific knowledge of the jurisdiction in which they are based. Each office has representatives in finance, HR, marketing and IT commensurate with its size. “Obviously we can’t have a global chief of each function in each office because the offices are all at various stages of development, but one of the strengths of Salans is that we seem to be good at retaining our key people, and so I have been able to develop a team that has good specialist knowledge of the regions in which we operate and that have the confidence of the partners.”
Woodcock reports directly to global managing partner Dariusz Oleszczuk and while Woodcock gives strategic input, he stresses that his responsibility is “how to make the strategy work on the ground”.
So far this has included overseeing the firm’s conversion to LLP. While firms of a simpler structure have been able to convert more quickly than Salans, Woodcock says that they have been working hard on dealing with the fundamentals. “No one is under any illusion here that converting to LLP is not a process but a culture change. Sticking LLP above the door doesn’t give partners any additional protection unless the behaviours change – tight terms of engagement, for example. It is about managing the collective responsibility that each partner has to their fellow partner while at the same giving an appropriate level of individual protection.”

Trusting your instincts
It is this individual responsibility that is also stressed when it comes to risk management within the firm. The lawyers are the first point of contact with a client and it is down to the lawyer to follow “common sense” procedures – and trust their instincts.
“Over the past three or four years, everyone in the firm has recognised that if you don’t consider risk-management issues as a core element of client engagement you expose yourself to real problems. It is not just something that happens to others. What we strive for is getting individual awareness, but then stressing the power of the team so that lawyers feel they can consult if there is an engagement they are not sure about.”
Lawyers, through the nature of their training, tend to be much more individualistic than accountants, reckons Woodcock, and by furthering the collaborative culture at Salans, it helps to reinforce the idea of sharing concerns before they become problems.
Working closely with risk-management partner Jeffrey Elton, Woodcock has been embedding strong disciplines in areas such as terms of engagement. “In general, the legal profession [compared to the accountancy profession] has been slower to adopt and formalise client engagement,” says Woodcock. “Lawyers are hot on conflict checking, which is a major risk, but the more holistic aspect, as in ‘is this someone I really want to engage with?’ is of key importance and has required development.”
If you engage with good clients and do good work for them then you rarely have cash-flow problems, believes Woodcock. Moreover, there is a big emphasis at the firm on making sure that partners bill promptly – and that they collect their bills. This is all part of the financial prudence that helps “fuel the engine” of the firm, as Woodcock puts it.
Woodcock believes that for COOs and FDs one of the biggest challenges over the next five years will be to harness the technological advances that firms have embraced and make them work so that there is much better and wider implementation in areas such as client communication, and document and knowledge management.
A major project for Woodcock’s team has been moving the firm’s platform from Novell GroupWise to Microsoft Outlook – a move not so much driven by the e-mail system but for what Salans wants to do in terms of developing client-relationship-management and document-management systems.
Outsourcing is also an area Woodcock has been involved in. While not having the sorts of volume in areas such as document production that would make big ticket outsourcing worthwhile, the firm engages selectively in the outsourcing of services for new offices. It may, for example, outsource a number of the finance functions during the interim phase in order to ensure they are compliant with local regulations. In addition, the firm doesn’t scale up resources internally until it is satisfied it has got the team and size of office that would justify it and may well continue to use the outsourcing supplier instead.
Woodcock adds that the firm is in the early stages of looking at outsourcing for the commodity aspects of knowledge management. “Clearly we wish to establish our own precedents and ensure that we source the important elements of KM which add value to client relationships, but equally there are areas where there is no point in reinventing the wheel.”
Both risk and outsourcing are areas with which Woodcock can speak with some authority, having been in charge of operational finance and risk management in PwC’s business-process outsourcing operations, which were subsequently sold to IBM. “PwC developed some good concepts but at the end of the day found that running a high volume/low margin business, together with conflict issues, did not fit their business model,” Woodcock explains. After this, Woodcock was asked if he would consider returning to the firm’s audit practice to take on the role of risk-management partner for Asia Pacific. However, Woodcock had other ideas.

Changing direction
By no means ready for an early retirement nor the type of person who desired “golf-club non-executive directorships”, Woodcock decided to take his career in another direction. “I wished to try my hand at line management – maybe I’m a masochist! So I put on my hair-shirt and got into of the business of trying to make things happen myself, instead of advising clients.”
It was then that he was invited to join Salans in the newly created role of global chief operating officer. Although Woodcock’s entire working life had been within the accountancy profession, he reckons the transition from the accountancy world to legal was relatively easy. “Although there are some obvious differences between the legal and accountancy professions, the similarities are greater. In both cases, you are working with a talented group of individuals who have opted to work together in partnership.”
At PwC Woodcock was a partner in the firm. Is it an issue now not being a partner? Woodcock reckons not. “The status of ‘partner’ in PwC was vital for me as it opened doors to potential clients and enhanced my opportunities to win work for the firm. At Salans my clients are primarily Dariusz and his team of partners, so it isn’t an issue. All that matters to me is that I have their confidence and they trust me to get on with the job they have asked me to do.”
It is this element of working with bright people that Woodcock comes back to when he talks about what he enjoys most about his job. “The bottom line is that I enjoy getting up in the morning and coming to work. I think if you are able to say that when you’re in your 58th year, that is something to be very happy with. Liking the firm and the people are key elements of why Salans is where I want to be until I decide to focus on my garden, and new challenges and opportunities keep on coming – my ‘to do’ list isn’t shortening.”
Woodcock said on joining Salans that if he was still there after five years, they should take him out and shoot him. This was on the basis that after that period of time they would have had all he had to offer by way of original thought, and in his words he would have “gone native” – which he reckons he has in some ways. Five years on, he’s relieved that the throwaway comment hasn’t been taken literally. “There are certainly days though when my colleagues would happily take me out and shoot me,” he adds.
The forthright Scot puts this down to his not mincing his words: “I tell it like I believe it needs telling, and not necessarily how my colleagues want to hear it sometimes, but I think they respect me for being somebody who has strong loyalty and respect for the firm but equally who won’t hesitate to express an opinion. You have to have the courage of your convictions when you’re doing this job.”