The ideal law firm for 2013? Eversheds hunts for its breakthrough

With an enviable brand reach, warm feedback from clients and a focus on innovation and value, Eversheds should be sweeping all before it. Legal Business explores why it hasn’t been quite that simple

Next year marks the 100th anniversary of Evershed & Tomkinson, the Birmingham firm that lent its name to the high-profile institution of which it would become part in 1995. Backed by a large regional network and a sizeable London arm Eversheds – as it became known – has grown to be one of the most recognisable names in the UK market.

Recent research from Legal Business and our sister research business The Legal 500 underlines the extent that this Midlands-bred brand now reaches. Our annual poll of in-house counsel put Eversheds as the top-ranked external adviser overall while the firm also garnered the most recommendations in the 2013 UK edition of The Legal 500.

While the latter accolade is in part a reflection of Eversheds’ scale and regional diversity, there is no doubt that the law firm stitched together from regional upstarts has made a major impact on the UK legal services market.

And the 342-partner firm certainly looks well adapted to an environment that increasingly prizes innovation, creativity and a focus on value, thanks to its partnering work with clients like DuPont and Tyco, investment in client-supporting technology and ventures such as a consulting arm and a ‘locum’ lawyer business. Run by a robust and financially disciplined chief executive in the shape of Bryan Hughes, in many regards Eversheds appears to be the ideal law firm for 2013, a market in which demanding clients and technology are pushing law firms to improve efficiency and value.

And yet the path to prominence has been anything but smooth. Eversheds earlier this year completed its sixth job consultation since September 2008, resulting in 116 staff leaving the firm. Over 900 jobs have been cut over the last five years, a number without precedent among major UK law firms.

This partly reflects that the firm, while light in the premium transactional areas which have been badly hit since the banking crisis, is heavily exposed to the UK’s battered regional property sector and has had – at least until recently – a relatively low profile in the high-end litigation which has boomed over the last five years. Neither could more active global markets assist much – as a relative late-comer to international expansion, Eversheds still derives relatively little of its direct revenue from outside the UK.

It is also accepted that the handling of earlier job cuts – made in a period in which law firms were genuinely concerned about how far off the cliff they would fall – was counter-productive. A firm which once, with good reason, prided itself on its morale has taken a substantial battering.

And for all its successes, many still contend that Eversheds has failed to effectively extend its business into premium service areas to balance its undoubted strength in delivering process-backed legal services to major companies. The aforementioned lack of international clout and a respectable but unspectacular practice in London have only heightened the claim – one acknowledged by the more self-critical Eversheds partners – that the brand which spreads wide doesn’t always reach high enough up the corporate hierarchy.

Still, if the firm attracts its fair share of sniping, there is plenty of admiration too. ‘It’s an impressive firm,’ observes Wragge & Co senior partner Quentin Poole. ‘You’ve got to admire their vision, turning themselves from a collection of regional offices into an international law firm.’

The contrary view is summed up by one former partner: ‘Management should be commended, and judging by the financials you have to say: “Well done, chaps.” But if you are looking for longevity and wanting to play at a senior level in industry, then they’re not exactly stuffed with people who can walk into boardrooms, pull up a chair and talk to the chief executive. It’s an extraordinary firm but I don’t think they’ve got first-call relationships with any FTSE 100 companies — and that’s a real issue.’

Eversheds remains a hard institution to grasp. Most major law firms either have periods of clear ascent or inertia – Eversheds in recent years has been as easy to imagine going on to future glory as it is sinking into drift and disarray.

Putting it together

Any judgement of Eversheds’ achievements has to bear in mind that in some regards the firm could be said to have only truly existed for 13 years, when the network of Eversheds fully financially integrated under the leadership of David Ansbro. There had been a series of regional mergers between 1988 and 1998 which formed the practice after the initial union of Birmingham’s Evershed & Tomkinson, Sheffield’s Broomheads & Neals, Manchester-based Alexander Tatham & Co and Daynes Hill & Perks in Norwich. But with so many disparate offices and cultures, Eversheds sometimes looked more an alliance than an integrated national giant.

The Leeds-based Ansbro was to run the hard yards of financial integration in forging a successful UK network out of one that had been rapidly assembled and had considerable cultural differences.

By the end of his term as managing partner in 2003, though in many regards successful, Ansbro had been visibly wearied by the task, which he handed over to the energetic David Gray, who was to lead Eversheds through the boom-period from 2003 to 2009.

This phase was outwardly successful, though the going for commercial firms was considerably more favourable. By the mid-2000s, Eversheds was beginning to seriously accept the idea that the business needed to internationalise, a reality the partnership had only paid lip service to before. This was less about Eversheds’ rapidly expanding network of alliances, Eversheds International – which typically featured European firms with relatively little cross-border clout – and more about fundamentally accepting a need for partners to think beyond the UK.

Gray proved a popular and populist leader, though critics could contend there was less of a focus on pushing through necessary reforms seen under his predecessor.

The firm made a symbolic commitment to its ambitions in 2008 when it moved into flagship City offices in Wood Street. The timing – coming months after the credit crunch had recast the global economy – was unfortunate but it was a necessary investment.

Another victim of poor timing was Hughes himself who took over as chief executive in May 2009 – as close to the eye of the storm as the modern legal profession has yet been. Hughes took over a sprawling, expansive firm that had built up a huge exposure to the UK property market and where costs – despite its regional offices – had ballooned.

The plain-speaking insurance litigator had plenty of relevant experience. Having cut his teeth at Eversheds’ successful, volume-heavy practice in Cardiff, he had been the firm’s chief operating officer and UK managing partner and was known for having a keen eye for how the business could be engineered for commercial success.

In a telling comment about the approach to law he learnt at Phillips & Buck, the Cardiff firm that joined Eversheds, Hughes in 2010 told Legal Business: ‘I worked out quite quickly that I could make a lot more money for the firm by not sitting there and doing it myself but by bringing the work in and getting people to do it the right way, at the right cost, structured correctly.’

But it was survival rather than success that first gained his attention. Eversheds was one of the first major UK law firms to feel the effects of the credit crunch, gearing up for a first round of job cuts – clumsily named Project August – a couple of weeks before the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008.

Things were to get much worse, which meant that the initial round of cuts didn’t reflect the magnitude of what was facing the business.

‘One of the worst facets of 2009-10 was the absolute uncertainty,’ says Hughes. ‘We never actually contemplated that the business would fail but no one was able to call the bottom of the market and we were very unsure about what kind of a state it would be left in. The speed and scale of the slowdown was totally unprecedented. A huge amount of activity just stopped overnight, in a way that no-one had ever seen before and obviously losing tens and tens of millions of pounds of revenue required action to protect the business. I am aware that we have been criticised for making more than one round of redundancies. The reality is, however, that a number of our business units were impacted at different times and over a period of time. Also when we made our first round of redundancies we cut the bare minimum hoping that things would turn around. However, a huge amount of work and revenue had disappeared for ever and when it was clear that the good times were not returning, we had to take further action.’

In total Eversheds was to go through four separate redundancy rounds during 2008 and 2009, cutting 735 jobs.

The firm’s turnover had been savaged, falling from a high in 2007/08 of £390m – a figure it has yet to better -to £366m the following year.

The real estate team’s revenues fell from a boom-time peak of nearly £100m to less than £70m in a period of 18 months.

Over the course of the next few years, the number of lawyers at the firm dropped sharply from the high of over 2,000 at the end of 2006/07 to 1,228 in 2010/11.

It was a difficult period. Eversheds’ culture was poorly prepared for the tough medicine Hughes applied, while the firm was pilloried for offering basic statutory redundancy packages in the 2009 round of cuts, a similar (and similarly unpopular) stance to DLA Piper but far less generous than packages on offer at supposedly ruthless City firms.

It is hard to overstate the impact this had on the firm. While many law firms talk about a collegiate culture, historically Eversheds really walked the talk — as such the firm’s morale had far further to fall. Indeed many former partners still talk with affection for the institution and its ethos.

Whatever has happened to the firm it isn’t a simple narrative of a ‘nice’ law firm turning ruthless in the pursuit of ambition – it is clear that Eversheds still genuinely wrestles with achieving performance while retaining a strong culture. Chairman John Heaps cites ‘Evershedsian behaviour – the spirit of Eversheds’; in many law firms that would be laughable, but few who know the firm doubt that such a thing exists.

One current partner asserts that the firm had to take a more robust line. ‘I don’t think you can go through anything like [job cuts] without an effect on morale. When you go through a change like that everyone starts looking inside the firm and goes, “Oh dear, it’s not very good here, is it?” I always say: “OK, go and talk to people at Addleshaws or DLA or Pinsents and then come back here and tell me it’s worse here than there.” I’m afraid we’re a big business now. We’ve grown up and changed.’

Controversy also dogged a plan in 2010 to outsource some work to South Africa, despite outsourcing becoming an increasingly common feature of the market in the post-Lehman world. But the complaints about the firm on legal websites were never about outsourcing, they were about a bruised workforce reacting to a changing business. Much of the griping was to focus on Hughes himself, whose robust style and down-to-earth humour didn’t always win hearts and minds.

The firm cut 75 support staff jobs in 2011 across Birmingham, Cardiff and Leeds as part of a back-office outsourcing deal with Accenture, primarily in finance and HR. Eversheds also held lengthy talks around this time about building an outsourcing business with Accenture but abandoned the discussions after it became clear that Accenture was only interested in getting more business from the firm.

But, even if it wasn’t pretty, Eversheds was demonstrating resilience.

Cutting again

For all the turbulence during Hughes’ first term, the measures he applied had considerable success. During the boom, Eversheds had allowed its headcount to swell and relied as much on high equity partner leverage to flatter profits per equity partner (PEP).

High leverage has remained – equity partnership has fallen from 145 five years ago to 133 in 2012/13, against 209 salaried partners. But Hughes’ efforts to slash costs have seen substantial increases in productivity against the key measures of not only PEP but also revenue per lawyer and profit per lawyer, a considerable achievement given that this coincided with a period of international investment. Current PEP of £640,000 is an all-time record for the firm. Renewed financial discipline also saw the firm pay off a £20m debt by the end of the 2011/12 financial year, while capital contributions were also increased.

So why the most recent round of cuts? One current partner notes, ironically, that senior management had allowed too much recruitment to be signed off (figures supplied to Legal Business show a sharp headcount rise between 2012 and 2013).

‘Following the last round of redundancies I know Lee [Ranson, Eversheds’ UK managing partner] and Bryan were disappointed in themselves because they’d allowed others to sign off on more recruitment without thinking about it so some teams had become bloated.’

Even the most rah-rah Eversheds partner would privately concede the firm has an entrenched habit of amassing sprawling teams, over-staffing and bureaucracy, a tendency that has somehow survived multiple job cuts. Indeed, despite making much of its lower regional costs, many argue its sprawling ten-office UK network requires major infrastructure to function.

The firm’s property practice – considerably reliant on the less buoyant property market outside the South East – was heavily impacted by the job losses. In addition, the firm’s Newcastle office, heavily exposed to the struggling North East economy, was also affected. Eversheds has also in recent years had to contend with the impact of austerity on its sizeable public sector practice.

Firm-wide head of litigation Ian Gray says the cuts come as a consequence of moving to undertake higher quality work. ‘The firm has been changing a lot, but I don’t think the message has been getting out there of just how much. I’ve brought in 15 high-quality lateral hires in the last four years to do and develop premium work. Partners who haven’t been operating at that kind of level, doing the kind of work that we don’t do any more, have then moved on. With things like real estate or commercial transactions, in this market place they just haven’t been there, so the firm has adapted and reshaped as a result of that.’

Hughes himself cites the need to ensure better margins to protect Eversheds as it sustains a period of heavy investment, much of which it focused on its international network (see box, ‘2020 – That Eversheds global vision’). He also made it clear to partners his focus on improving profits year-on-year upon being appointed for a second term last year.

There have certainly been a significant number of departures at the firm, with over 40 partners having departed since the start of January 2012 (though this figure includes normal retirements).

Not mentioning the regions

If the Eversheds message has at times become confused, this in part reflects the tension between its London arm and its regional offices, which still generate large amounts of the firm’s profits, and the consequent lack of clarity about its positioning.

While Eversheds may not much project its regional roots these days, it still has some very successful and substantial operations across the UK. Its Cardiff operation – whose DNA runs through the firm to a surprising extent given the tiny size of the local legal economy – turns over £60m. Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham respectively earned £44m, £43m and £47m in the last financial year. Stephen Manson – who worked in the firm’s Cardiff office for 17 years before moving to London to head the UK developers and regeneration group four years ago – says: ‘The regional presence is still very strong. Client relationships are often spread around the business and are not London-centric. The work we do for Network Rail, for example, is shared between Cardiff and London.’

‘A good proportion of our work has an international angle and we’re finding that the global network is giving us good opportunities that other firms are missing out on. We acted for [British-based international packaging business] DS Smith on a reverse takeover in 32 countries, and last year we acted for Natus Medical in 17 countries,’ says David Beswick, senior partner at the firm’s Birmingham office, which counts real estate, corporate commercial, litigation and human resources as key practice areas.

Historically, there was some friction between the major regional offices, in particular the entrepreneurial Birmingham arm and the more volume-focused Cardiff office. It says something about the firm that London, in contrast, is generally viewed as having less of a defined local personality (and less of a propensity for office politics).

There has also long been a sharp divide between the engine room offices like Cardiff, Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester and less successful branches like Newcastle, Nottingham and Ipswich.

‘The culture was slightly different in all the offices,’ observes Manchester banking and finance head Nigel Dale. ‘Leeds was more of a traditional PLC-type, Manchester was more entrepreneurial and Birmingham very entrepreneurial. Bringing them all together was difficult but David Ansbro was superb at making sure all the cultures moved and shaped to achieve that. David Gray then took it to the next level so people forgot they were partners in a regional office. By the time Bryan became CEO, everyone believed they were a partner in a massive organisation.’

Despite the complications of managing so many offices – which are familiar to most nationally-forged law firms – background noise of inter-office griping has largely been a manageable issue at Eversheds, with the firm building a solid record for co-operation and consistency through the 2000s.

Still, most neutral observers question the long-term case for having as wide a regional network. (An earlier review of its network saw the closure of its branches in Bristol and Derby, while its Norwich office was closed in 2008.)

Comments one senior partner at a rival firm: ‘The problem with Eversheds is that it was built from lots of regional offices, built on servicing clients in those places. Now there isn’t really much work to do of the type that an Eversheds or a Wragges would want to do, so basically the people in those offices are servicing London-produced work. I know from management that they’d like to close some offices but it’s hard to do this.’

Another former partner interviewed comments: ‘The Nottingham and Newcastle offices are waiting for Godot to be frank! There’s no point them being there. It’s been a slow death. The Nottingham office had 200 people in 2000, there are maybe 80 now, if you count the cleaners.’

Peers, ex-partners and some partners note that, with roots sunk deep in the regions, Eversheds lacks swagger in the City – a common issue with the business model but more of a feature for the firm in comparison to comparable peers like DLA Piper and Pinsent Masons.

For all the talk of focus on London, the power centre of Eversheds stills remains regionally-focused – a factor many contend has seen the firm make relatively slow progress in the City.

The 98-partner office generated £95m last financial year, 25% of revenues, a proportion that has only crept up in the last decade. While London is a substantive business boasting well regarded teams in financial services, pensions and employment – its continued lack of profile in mid-market corporate and disputes has hurt its progress. Given Eversheds’ relatively early move into London – with the 1995 takeover of Jaques & Lewis then bolstered in 1998 with the takeover of Frere Cholmeley Bischoff – more ground could have been made.

Neither has the firm had huge success at luring and retaining partners with solid ‘City’ CVs and backgrounds. In comparison, DLA Piper, which leveraged off a stronger brand in deal finance, is widely viewed as having made more ground in the Square Mile and at a wider level committed more fully to London (though it should be remembered that London has still been a mixed success for the world’s largest law firm).

‘[Many of] the partners in the London office have been dropped in from the regions, they’re not City born and bred,’ claims one ex-partner. ‘Regardless of how good you are, if you haven’t grown up there and had the London training it’s hard to compete. Even on a social level, London lawyers have all grown up together, you just don’t get that connection if you’ve been parachuted in.’

‘It’s misleading to look just at the turnover,’ Ranson counters. ‘It’s hugely important to us that we have a credible London practice and we’ve made heavy investment in terms of lateral hires and looking to upskill. The quality of the product can match silver circle in any area. But we’ve been very clear, when clients come to us with problems, we don’t look at it like: “You’ll just be dealt with by the London office.” Is it right that you pay City rates for all work? Even with the most complex transactions, we make no apologies, we separate work out.’

Head of UK company commercial Keith Froud, however, is clear that Eversheds is making a concerted effort to upgrade the work undertaken by the firm’s 40-lawyer corporate team in the City. ‘We’ve already done an awful lot of work,’ says Froud. ‘Corporate grew by over 20% in London in 2012/13. We are really focusing on high-end strategic M&A, for both longstanding corporate clients, such as May Gurney, Anglo America, Parker Hannifin and Dairy Crest, but also expanding into other clients of the firm, including a $5bn deal for Cisco, and winning new M&A clients, like Mitsubishi.’

There is certainly a feeling that Eversheds can and should be pushing the envelope further in terms of the premium work it takes on given its scale and bluechip client-base in order to avoid being boxed into being a polished volume provider to big name clients.

Unlike some nationally-bred firms, this isn’t about resources. Thanks in part to Hughes’ discipline, the firm has the financial muscle to recruit serious City lawyers. With PEP having been hiked the firm stands well against most London peers. The firm’s pay model also gives scope to pay competitive City rates. A 12-band meritocratic system sees earnings for partners on band 1 start at £312,000, rising £112,000 for each band – allowing it to pay well over £1m for top performers. The firm has conservatively kept its powder dry in this regard, so far using only the first nine bands in its model, but the scope is there. (Partner pay is evaluated every two years, allowing partners to be moved up or down by up to two bands. Partners are scored on five core criteria: client development; people and leadership skills; teamwork and firm-wide business development; profitability of work undertaken; and strategic contribution.)

Few question the quality of Eversheds’ client-base, which includes regular instructions for clients including DuPont, Tyco, Qatar National Bank, Smiths Group, Starbucks, John Lewis, Santander, Barclays, HSBC, Network Rail, Rolls-Royce, Boeing, Marks & Spencer, and ENI.

Last month the firm was also re-appointed to a much slimmed down panel for financial services group Legal & General.

One promising sign for the firm is its expansion in disputes, an area in which the firm was well regarded during the 1990s but failed to build upon during the boom (a strategy that worked very well for Addleshaw Goddard). Ian Gray, who became head of litigation in 2008, says that the practice group – which undertakes work for banks including Deutsche Bank, Barclays and Lloyds, among others – has now become the largest at Eversheds, making around 30% of the firm’s revenue following double-digit growth in the last three years, including a 27% hike in the last year. ‘We were doing the commoditised side of things frankly back in the 1990s and early 2000s, now it’s things like interest rate mis-selling – with 100 lawyers working on big investigations – and investigations into PPI mis-selling for the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).

‘When I took the role on, all I was interested in was growing the high end City work, that’s why we’ve got the growth, which has influenced the firm’s profitability a lot. Despite downsizing real estate, the reason the profits have stayed up is because of the nature of the work we’ve been doing.’

Other respected operators include financial services head Pamela Thompson, widely regarded as a star and viewed by some as the firm’s top partner in London. Other notable performers include London senior partner and HR and pension specialist Anthony Arter, competition head Ros Kellaway and finance litigator Matthew Allen.

However, it is fair to say that Eversheds has – for whatever reason – made less ground in developing and projecting a band of heavy-hitting partners that could lead its charge in the Square Mile than expected.

While it is hard to question Eversheds’ avoidance of crass, money-driven partner hiring that has hurt many entrants to the City, there is a case for the firm to engage in a little more tactically-focused recruitment, both to build its premium business but also to infuse a little more City personality into its make-up. There are some claims that Eversheds has been relatively slow to put in investment in the City when London-based partners have pressed the case.

Comments another former partner: ‘It’s high volume work with slimmer margins and that is principally because they are selling at general counsel (GC) level rather than board level so they come under pricing pressure. They are on a continual evolution of how you can provide the same set of services for constantly decreasing prices. Don’t get me wrong, Eversheds are very good at that, they are very innovative and have exceptionally bright and talented people and they will do well at doing that, but they can’t expect to keep increasing PEP unless they grow the business or do higher end work.’

Glancing at the trophy mandates the firm has recently undertaken, while more impressive than many peers would allow, it is clear that there is scope for Eversheds to move further up the value chain with key clients. Even one GC interviewed for this piece at one of the firm’s largest clients, says that, while praising the firm for mid-tier work, he would be wary of taking the personal risk of instructing Eversheds on high-value work, due to expectations from the board that such work should go to top City firms.

Has Eversheds done enough to challenge those attitudes?

The management, the message

Ultimately, much of the criticism of the firm is directed at the firm’s strategy, message and management. The issue of leadership comes up repeatedly, with some contending that Eversheds has a swollen caste of spreadsheet driven managers, who are effective internally but have low visibility and engagement with clients.

The extent to which Eversheds has become a top-down, corporatised structure is also often cited, with many noting that the firm has not had a contested election since the divisive three-way contest that elevated Gray in 2003 (Gray was re-appointed for a second term without a contested vote as was Hughes for both his terms).

One former lawyer of the firm claims it has more than 25 partners in management earning over £500,000 without significant fee-earning or client roles. The firm’s multi-office structure does require considerable infrastructure. The firm is run by a management team of Hughes; Ranson; client services director Julie Stobart; finance director Kathryn Fleming; HR head Angus Macgregor; and major practice heads Martin Warren (employment and pensions), David Gray (litigation), David Watkins (real estate), and Keith Froud, (company commercial).

The management team reports to the LLP board, chaired by the well-respected litigator John Heaps. The oversight body includes three elected representatives – currently partners Rob Pitcher, Amrik Kandola and Sue Lewis, former Unilever GC Steve Williams as a non-executive director and GC Angela Robertson. (The firm maintains a separate international strategy body and a board for Eversheds International, its network of allied firms.)

Much attention has focused on Hughes himself. Seen by detractors as a bruiser from the regions, it is apparent that Hughes has not managed the trick of DLA Piper’s Nigel Knowles in turning his background into a potent part of the challenger brand sell.

Hughes – who some see as an intimidating figure – also tends to project better on one-on-one or with smaller groups than dealing with larger teams, at times striking an uncertain tone between his unstuffy sense of humour, clear ambition and no-nonsense approach. Ranson in comparison is viewed as a more approachable figure. One of the more nuanced criticisms offered of Hughes is that he has not focused on engaging and motivating the high-productivity partners that could take Eversheds upmarket.

Hughes himself isn’t one for introspection. When asked how he is seen as a leader he responds drily: ‘If I knew that I’d sit in my office and cry. I’ve managed the firm through a difficult time. I think I’m seen as fair. We did what we did for the benefit of the business.’

If Hughes hasn’t pandered towards City etiquette, he is widely admired for the rigour he has delivered during brutal market conditions. Despite claims that its senior leadership is not open to input from the partnership, the firm defends its policy of avoiding contested elections. Leaders are restricted to two terms, meaning there will be a substantial leadership decision for the firm when Hughes’ term ends in 2017. Effective though he in many respects, whether Eversheds will look to another ‘war-time leader’ rather than a more consensual figure will be interesting.

Leadership aside, some of the ambivalence regarding the firm is clearly linked to lack of clarity about where it is focused. Eversheds has long called itself a European practice but has recently made a big play of pitching itself as a global law firm.

This is linked to a pitch made when Hughes set out the firm’s 2020 vision last summer just after he was re-appointed for a second four-year term – essentially a strategy for the firm to globalise its business. However, part of the problem is that, while no one questions the need for international expansion, this branding push hardly plays to the firm’s current strengths given that it remains one of the least internationally-developed players in the UK top 25.

Manchester head Michael Clavell-Bate puts the case for changing the message: ‘Some adjustment on the communications and the alignment of the brand has been necessary. We have suffered for many years with clients not knowing we had a global offering. Wrongly branded for many years as a national firm with regional offices and some loose franchising-type association, we’ve had to try and move that perception to the reality – a globally integrated business.’

Still, the global brand push – which ironically Hughes isn’t that enamoured of – has arguably distracted attention from where the firm has a more distinctive edge: its track record of client-centric innovation, as witnessed through a host of initiatives (see box, ‘A flair for innovation’).

It could be argued that Eversheds would do better to quietly continue with its path to globalise its business – which is set to see it tackle the thorny issue of its coverage in Europe and ultimately seek a US union – rather than over-promising and drawing attention to what is currently a work in progress.

The irony for Eversheds is that its business model and many positive qualities – notably a genuine commitment to teamwork, the provision of good service and value and an imaginative streak – should be coming into their own.

If there is a firm that looks ideally placed to speak to the modern GC, Eversheds, as imagined by Hughes and the firm’s senior management would appear to be it. Indeed, Eversheds would look to be a prime candidate to comprehensively outperform its peers. But despite strong work on profitability, revenues have instead edged back over the last five years.

Yet the opportunity for the firm remains huge. Generating £376m, few UK-heavy rivals can match it for scale or visibility. Such resources give it substantial scope to make progress on the international expansion which by most judgments was delayed too long.

Hughes touches on this aspect of the firm’s character when asked how he sees the Eversheds brand. ‘We’re seen as something different, the newish kids on the block. We’re innovators but also a relationship firm.’

Given the firm’s ambitions, it would surely also make sense for a greater accommodation between its skill in process and cultivating the kind of thrusting characters required to make more ground in the City.

Such a push, if well executed would do more for the brand than a one-note recital of its global credentials.

In this respect clarity regarding the long-term position of its regional network would also help. If, as many believe, it should focus its efforts on its stronger four or five regional outposts, that decision should be taken sooner rather than later. It would also be preferable to have a single clear hub to handle ‘north-shoring’, most likely in Cardiff, rather than expect other major offices to take a support role to London. A supporting role for the City is poor for morale of the kind of top-drawer partners in Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds upon which Eversheds built its name and still needs. And London itself should be increasingly focused on a full frontal push in the City rather than handling work that requires regional support.

As Hughes settles into his second term – the point where most law firm leaders do their best work – there is a good case for a management style that is, if not more consensual, then a little more outward-facing and receptive to the partnership and select GCs. Backed with solid profitability and financial management, Eversheds remains in many cases superbly positioned if it can marry City quality with its drive to innovate around service delivery.

If Eversheds partners sometimes make heavy weather of articulating the firm’s message, luckily some of their clients do better. As Mel Rowlands, GC at Smiths Group, puts it: ‘We don’t compromise on quality and value for money – Eversheds provides both. More than that, they are really passionate about being business partners.’

There are worse ways to sell a law firm. LB

francesca.fanshawe@legalease.co.uk

Additional reporting Sarah Downey

Photographs Juan Trujillo