Richard Medd’s tenure as Browne Jacobson managing partner began in the spring of 2020, amid the chaos of the early months of Covid. While many would view such timing as unfortunate, Medd sees it differently: ‘Looking back, there were advantages to starting at that time. The whole world was starting again, which gave me a chance to implement my ideas.’
This ability to take whatever life throws at him in his stride has helped Medd to spearhead a period of extended growth for Browne Jacobson. Since he took over in May 2020, revenues have grown by almost 50% from £81m to £118m, with new offices opening in Dublin in 2022 and Cardiff in 2023.
As Medd puts it: ‘The firm recognised it was at a transition point and decided to accelerate hiring, expand coverage, and move up the food chain.’
The firm, which has its roots in the Midlands, now has seven offices across the UK and Ireland, and sits at 49th in the LB100 on the back of three consecutive years of double-digit growth, with revenue rising 12% during 2023-24.
The firm’s key sectors are government, education and health, and while Medd acknowledges that more London-centric observers are likely to know them best as ‘the health firm, or the public sector firm’, in reality, it has a roughly 50/50 split between public sector and private sector work, with key corporate clients including Lloyds Development Capital, Hiscox, Muller UK & Ireland and Scania.
Alongside this, the firm has been blazing a trail on social mobility – topping the Social Mobility Foundation’s Social Mobility Employer Index three times in the last four years.
‘We’re gaining huge momentum,’ says senior partner Caroline Green, who became the first woman to hold that role at the firm when she took over in 2019.
It is clear that both Medd and Green are excited about the firm’s recent successes, and are optimistic about the potential to take the firm forward further.
‘We think there is a significant advantage in additional scale,’ Medd says. ‘We’re also very focused on getting the reality of our private sector practice better known, particularly in London’.
Medd and Green believe the equal split between public sector and private sector work is a key strength, with Green explaining that the firm acts as a connector, forging links between corporates and the public sector in both directions.
The new offices have also played a key part in Brown Jacobson’s recent growth. Dublin, launched in September 2022 with two partners, now has seven partners and 17 lawyers, with standout deals such as advising Irish plant-based frozen foods startup Strong Roots on its acquisition by McCain Foods.
Cardiff, which opened in July 2023, has since grown from two partners to six, and a total headcount of 29. Standout work for the Cardiff office includes acting as sole legal advisers to the Celtic Freeport’s lead authority and accountable body.
In London, where the firm has around 70 lawyers, including 25 partners, Medd believes the firm has a ‘huge opportunity’ to grow on the back of client demand. The addition of commercial and technology partners Rowan Armstrong and Alex Mason from EY Law in May underscored this focus, while private equity is another area in which Medd believes the firm can continue to grow following the firm’s entry into the Legal 500’s London private equity transactions rankings for the first time this year.
Shifts in the wider legal market have also helped Browne Jacobson. With many former national leaders like Eversheds Sutherland and DLA Piper shifting their emphasis ever more towards higher-value international work, opportunities have opened up for firms like Browne Jacobson to step in. ‘A group of firms that might have previously competed with us for work have changed their focus,’ Medd notes.
Medd also believes that the firm’s success has not come at a cost to the firm’s culture. Underpinned by its strong reputation for social mobility, the firm has a reputation for being a happy ship, and in a recent internal survey, ‘inclusive’ was the most common word used to describe the culture at the firm.
He says the firm has an ‘absolute commitment to non-hierarchical structures.’ Noting that the firm is all open plan with no closed offices, and he mentions a debate the firm had around three years ago to underscore the point: ‘We’d never had job titles on emails. But we got too big, and people would be getting emails from people and having no idea who they were.’
Green adds that inclusivity at the firm is by no means a recent development: ‘The first thing I noticed when I came to Browne Jacobson in 1984 was that there were no titles – I’d come from an environment where I had to call all the partners Mr So-and-So.’
In terms of future ambitions, Medd believes that moving up the LB100 rankings by five to ten places – or indeed even further – in the coming years is a reasonable aspiration, but is clear that growth ‘has to be profitable’.
‘I think the whole industry is too focused on turnover,’ he says. ‘To attract and retain the best talent and make the investments we’re going to need to make in technology and other areas, we need to be profitable.’
And while many firms make bold claims about revenue targets and ambitions, Browne Jacobson’s recent successes do add credibility to the firm’s optimism about the future. As Medd concludes: ‘There’s a big difference between saying it and doing it. And I really feel like we’ve done it.’