High-flying City firm Mishcon de Reya recently kicked off a review of its strategy, aiming to create a ten-year vision. Managing partner Kevin Gold, last month named Management Partner of the Year at the Legal Business Awards, talks to Sarah Downey about the firm’s future as a limited liability partnership, its Manhattan struggles and his leadership style.
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What are the firm’s international plans?
We’ve broken the world up into regions. We’re not looking at opening offices but relationships. We’ve always pursued relationships – 70% of our business comes globally. We just put more structure into how we view and track them.
How has the New York office performed?
It’s all right. It’s very complicated. They have a different DNA compared to London. New York is a separate business. The three practice areas we’re doing, we’ve done reasonably well. What I’ve learned about that is it’s difficult to go into a mature market. You have to do it properly, you can’t fuddle along. It’s a $13m business and in some areas it’s done well, others it’s struggled. The biggest struggle has been we say one thing, they hear something else. Everyone is an individual in New York. We talk about our values – they don’t actually really buy it. They say they do, but they don’t get it. That’s a New York thing. That’s been the biggest lesson – just because you speak English doesn’t mean you understand the same language. You can’t take a blueprint of a London offering and roll it out into another culture.
Who do you view as your peers?
We don’t actually have peers – we have peers per practice area: property lawyers for instance will benchmark their own practices against their competitors, which are completely different animals to who the litigators are competing against; whereas many firms can see themselves within a category of the market. We’re not totally unaware of our peers, but as we continue to grow both the top and bottom line, attract great people and have fun, that’s good enough for me.
What made the firm decide to convert to a limited liability partnership (LLP)?
The driver for us was never about our love of LLPs, it was the risk of taking a major lease like Africa House and personal liability to the partners as opposed to having a lease in an LLP – the driver was real estate. We resisted it because we believe in the model of partnership. In the agreement we’ve almost finalised negotiating, the essence of partnership will be a key criteria.
What kind of leader are you?
I can’t really answer what kind of a leader I am… people have different styles. Mine isn’t one that gets involved in the technical minutia of the firm. People much cleverer than me are paid handsomely to deal with that kind of thing… what I try to do is to take a helicopter view of where we are and where we’re going as a catalyst to create and push through our value system, and to act as a fair umpire within the balancing of resources.
sarah.downey@legalease.co.uk