I always wanted to be an architect. Unfortunately I’m very messy and that’s a bad combination. Building useful things, such as bridges and roads, would be a great job.
My father was a history teacher and my favourite subject was history, but I knew I was never going to be a history teacher as I could see what it was like for him. I did law to keep my options open and was offered a job by Simmons, which felt like a phenomenally well-paid job. It wasn’t my life plan.
Law can be surreal. A long time ago, I remember being one of 80 lawyers in a massive room with hundreds of documents and some big box that we were supposed to throw them in, with none effective until the last one was in the box, and a document that defined when the box and deal would close. We had the most unbelievable mechanics for closing this transaction. If you filmed it, people watching would have felt the world had gone mad.
I’ve never been bored and that’s a treat. With most jobs there is a lot of boredom involved.
It wasn’t a difficult decision to throw my hat into the ring to be managing partner. It came at a natural point in terms of making the step up. I’d run finance here for six years and that is the largest practice group in the firm. I was up against Hans-Hermann [Aldenhoff], who is a very high-quality partner, but he hadn’t had the same range of positions that I’d had, so I was better known across the firm. I’ll never know how many votes I won by – it could have been one; it could have been 50.
You have to be honest, Simmons is not of the scale of the Magic Circle and we probably never will be, and that means we are in a different place. We have taken a different road to some of our closest peers. A few years ago, from a client’s perspective, Simmons was indistinguishable from some of those firms. Now we’re different.
The sector strategy means something here. It defines what we do and where we invest. That’s powerful. Some of those sectors, financial institutions for example, have been a difficult marketplace over the last few years. Some of our traditional competitors have pulled back from that space, which puts us in a good position, but we need to be making the most of those opportunities.
The business of law isn’t getting any easier. We’ve got 240 partners. We need 240 partners to be out there all the time with our clients and pushing our services. Clients expect it. We often hear that Simmons is not as pushy as other firms in trying to sell other services. We need to be energetic.
I’ve never felt the world is about to end at work. Stuff happens. If you let yourself burst into tears and cry in the corner when something bad happens, you shouldn’t be in the job. Go and kick the filing cabinets. It’s going to happen and it will happen again tomorrow.
I’ve got three young kids and if you go home and say, ‘I’ve had a bad day’, they’re like: ‘Yeah, yeah, move out the way – I’m watching the TV.’ It brings it all back into focus. I’m at that age in life when friends of mine are having serious illnesses. At the end of the day, this is a business that’s been running for a very long time and it’s in a good position.
You can easily succumb to the PR around the role, and think that you’re big and important when you’re not. The managing partner role is what’s big and important; you’re just the person in it.
We want to be a serious player on the global stage and that means we need to be significantly bigger than we are. We want to be growing, but growing in areas relevant to our sectors. There is no doubt that is a challenge for us.
We get beaten up over profitability and we beat ourselves up over profitability. My objective is to improve the profitability of the firm. We’re making progress, but I’d like it to be quicker.
Leadership style? I try to form views in the best interests of the firm, and I am prepared to make and stick with decisions.
I am an impatient individual, and I try to keep that under control and not let it influence my decision making. When things take longer than I thought they’d take, that’s frustrating.
One piece of advice that sticks in my mind is that you can’t expect to be liked and don’t go into this job if you think it’s a way of being popular, because it’s not. That’s very true. You’ve an interesting dynamic as people want to have a good relationship with you because you have some influence. They want you to like them and that’s nice. But you’ve also got to say things that they don’t want.
I was a supporter of the proposal to open in Moscow in 2007, which turned out to be a big mistake and we closed it quite quickly. It was a narrow offering, securities pure and simple, based off two clients, both of whom stopped doing business in that area within months of us opening. You’ve got to be careful about the small office and it’s no coincidence we opened in Singapore, Munich and Bristol with large partner teams.
We have further to go in innovation. We still have a traditional mindset with how we service a client, with limited use of technology, and although we’ve done something on the efficiency side, we’re not there yet. I’d like to push us further in that direction.
My kids won some massive minion, a three-foot high yellow thing almost as high as my youngest, on the first day of our summer holiday in California. I had to drag it all the way around with me hoping its arms would fall off and I could throw it away. It’s now back in the Hoyland household.
Jeremy Hoyland is managing partner of Simmons & Simmons
tom.moore@legalease.co.uk