From consolidation to price pressure, to market confidence, leading management figures at Legal Business 100 firms give us their views on the 2012/13 year and the challenges ahead
Value for money
‘We’re facing fee pressure of course – and it won’t ease – but there is recognition from clients of different levels of service. The key word is not price but value. Finding a pricing structure which works for the client is essential, as well as supporting the legal departments of clients – helping them to frame key issues to management, helping on staffing shortages, training and knowledge management and so on. These are all areas law firms should embrace.’
Paul Olney, practice partner, Slaughter and May
Cost-effective outsourcing
‘While strength is important, we also want to be able to offer our clients value. We have a well-established record in innovative approaches to legal advice. For example, we now have 640 people working for us in India. We have 60 people in our knowledge support centre, which helps the practice globally. This outsourcing approach is increasingly gaining traction among our staff and many of our major clients are benefiting from this. As a result of these efficiency programmes we’ve seen our costs coming down.’
David Childs, managing partner, Clifford Chance
Merger talks aplenty
‘The thing about merger discussions is the market is so active, there’s always someone ringing up saying “have you thought about such and such?”. We fully acknowledge that we like doing mergers – we’ve done several. It’s a great way of taking forward our strategy, but we only do them every so often because they have a very significant impact.’
David Ryan, managing partner, Pinsent Masons
Beyond the Eurozone
‘If you restrict yourself just to the UK, particularly outside of London, you’ll see things going quite slow. But if you are actually focusing on what UK PLC is doing, there’s more scope. Traditional trading areas such as the eurozone are obviously quite flat, but there are plenty of decent markets around the world, which is where our client base has gone and why we’ve followed them.’
Bryan Hughes, chief executive, Eversheds
London’s global advantage
‘As a firm we are privileged to sit in London, where maybe 65% or 75% of the City has a foreign element to it. In that way, London is a gateway to the global market. We sit in a reasonably cosy cocoon not having to fight for the industrial clients of the UK.’
Kevin Gold, managing partner, Mishcon de Reya
Brighter days
‘The last three or four months have seen a real market shift, you can see a lot more confidence. You look at the daily papers now and rather than the doom and gloom, you get recovery mentioned time and time again. We’ve seen a real confidence return to the market place and a real heightening of activity. There’s still a lot of pricing pressure out there, which is inevitable until confidence returns properly, but it suits us quite well with a model like ours where we’re able to offer a reasonable rate and a good quality service.’
Andrew Leaitherland, managing partner and CEO, DWF
Bank tactics will change
‘You will see more law firm failures and banks intervening earlier; the banks we speak to are going to take much more of a stakeholder attitude. They’ll do more hands-on management to get firms through difficulties and if that doesn’t work they’ll knock them over sooner.’
Peter Jackson, managing partner, Hill Dickinson
International reach is key
‘Firms that don’t have a distinctive market position are going to find things more difficult. Mid-tier City firms, for example, may be the ones that lose out on transactions. The big names should do well, as should firms with a good geographic spread. Globalising provides a hedge. Is it now right to globalise? It is expensive and presents cultural challenges if done quickly and it is not an automatic solution to problems in the domestic market. Firms that have good international footprints already are in much better shape.’
Michael Greville, managing partner, Watson, Farley & Williams
Quality not quantity
‘Clients have always been demanding and are entitled to be demanding. Why shouldn’t they be? They expect us to do things faster, better, cheaper. We’ve seen the other side of the equation too – quite a lot of our big client relationships came up for tender this year. We were successful on those occasions. We saw the clients reduce the number of firms that they wanted on their panels. I think they realise that the best relationships are deep rather than superficial. There’s a trend in that direction. Clients (or good general counsel) have done well in bringing together a combination of firms and expertise. They’re not necessarily looking for a one-stop shop.’
Dick Tyler, senior partner, CMS Cameron McKenna