Beyond managing partner: Become a go-to expert in law firm management

Being managing partner doesn’t have to be the end of your career, nor does your last term in office have to be the end of the skills and knowledge you have built in law firm management. Tony Angel went from being firmwide managing partner of Linklaters to global co-chair and senior partner at DLA Piper. Many other managing partners of law firms have gone on to build successful careers as experts in law firm management after stepping away from the helm, including:

• Malcolm Shelton-Agar – formerly managing partner at DLA Phillips Fox, later chief operating officer at Allen & Gledhill, now chief executive officer at Jackson McDonald;

• Guy Vincent – formerly managing partner at Bower Cotton and Bircham Dyson Bell, now corporate partner at the latter;

• Guy Stobart – formerly managing partner at Burgess Salmon, now
  CEO at Kennedys;

• Alasdair Douglas – formerly senior
  and managing partner at Travers
  Smith, now chair of the City of
  London Law Society;

• Mark Dawkins – formerly global managing partner at Simmons & Simmons, now partner at Bingham McCutchen;

• Jason Rowley – formerly managing partner at Vizard Wyeth, later CEO at 12 King’s Bench Walk chambers and senior underwriting manager at Temple Legal Protection, now costs judge at the Royal Courts of Justice;

• Peter Alfandary – formerly managing partner at Warner Cranston, now a senior consultant at Reed Smith;

• Nigel Haddon – formerly managing partner at SAS Daniels, now a consultant to law firms;

• Nick Jarrett-Kerr – formerly chief executive partner at Bevan Ashford, now an advisor to law firms worldwide; and

• Tony Williams, formerly global managing partner at Clifford Chance, later global managing partner at Andersen Legal, now principal at Jomati Consultants.

If you think any of their career paths sound attractive, let’s consider how you, as managing partner, can also plan for the day that you will step down from your current position and start your next career as an expert in law firm management.

Transition plan

First, you will need to manage your endings and plan your transition into your new role. If your firm has been very successful under your leadership, you may experience reluctance from your partners to you stepping down.

When Peter Gillman executive chair and former managing partner of UK accountancy firm Price Bailey decided it was time for him to step down as managing director, he put proposals to his board and partner team about 18 months before his initial intended handover date. His proposals to his board included:

• why a change at this time was appropriate for the firm;

• what the transition plan would look like;

• how he would work with his successor; and

• his vision for his new role.

Gillman went on to become a practice management specialist, with clients including small and medium-sized legal
and accountancy practices.

If you have the luxury of a fixed term in office or an open dialogue about when you plan to step down, you will find, as James Mendelssohn, chair of MSI Global Alliance did, that it is much easier to form a mutually-agreeable succession plan and handover.

As he notes, “it is much better, and far less sensitive, to have conversations about your personal succession plan many years before you want to hand over the reins”.

Mendelssohn went on to found Firm Management Associates, which advises mid-sized firms and charities.

Part of your dialogue with your firm’s leadership team and wider partnership
team needs to include:

• a plan for a smooth and seamless transition between you and your successor;

• if you plan to stay within your firm, how your new role as practice management expert will benefit the firm; and

• how you will actively support and mentor your successor.

“After a number of years of leading a firm, it can be very difficult to get back into fee earning work,” Mendelssohn reflects. “You can’t resign on 31 December, go skiing for two weeks, and then expect to come back to a full diary of client work.”

Aim to have a two-year transition plan. This will help you build up your pipeline, network and credibility as a law firm management expert before you step down from your managing partner role.

Need for clarity

Going back to fee earning or trying to
break into a new marketplace is not
easy. You’ve been known as managing partner, but it will take time to be known and gain a reputation as a practice management expert.

Law firms tend to have lengthy decision-making processes and long
sales cycles. They are, understandably, reluctant to just let anyone advise them on their often highly-sensitive practice management challenges.

Consequently, you need to be either very well known to the firm or prepared
to invest a hefty amount of time to gain its trust before it will buy your services. Don’t underestimate how tough it may be to re-establish yourself and build a pipeline
of work after a stint as managing partner.

Before you embark on your journey to become a recognised expert in law firm management, take the time to reflect on:

• How will this career track help you mentally, physically and financially?

• What will you have to give up to
  get there?

If you have a relatively long transition plan, set yourself three-monthly goals to achieve. That way, you can break up your transition plan into meaningfully-sized bites and have a realistic action plan. This will help you to still do your day job while preparing for your new fee-earning role.

Client research

Before you spend any time on marketing your services as a law firm management expert, you will need to identify what services your future client base is likely
to be looking for and, ultimately, buy. Do
not assume that you know what they want and need.

Ways to research your market include:

• interviews with partners in law firms
  and advisors to law firms;

• legal conferences and events;

• focus groups;

• the legal press and blogs;

• law firm-related Tweets and LinkedIn discussion groups; and

• legal communities on Google+
  and LinkedIn.

Typically, your clients will be driven to buy your services by a ‘pain point’, or a deep-seated emotional rather than logical reason. This may seem counterintuitive at first. But, the initial impulse to hire a consultant is always an emotional one, which is then backed up by logical and rational reasons.

Your research will help you to drill down into these pain points, which will be the underlying reason why your niche market wants to buy your services. These pain points will form the basis of the services that you offer clients.

Questions to help you get underneath the skin of law firms include:

• What characteristics do these law
  firms share?

• What categories do these firms typically fall into? (e.g. size, structure, fee income and maturity)

• What challenges or problems do they typically face?

• What problems can I solve for them?

• Where do they socialise online and
  in the ‘real’ world?

• Where do I already have examples of how I have, for my firm, solved problems similar to what they
  are experiencing?

• What problems would they pay for external help to solve?

Service proposition

Your research will help you identify a simple menu of services, which will solve the main and most painful problems your law firm clients will be suffering. Next, take the time to consider the features of your services, particularly how you will supply them. Very often, it is the ‘how’ that will differentiate you from your competition. For example, do your services include mentoring via phone, email or in person for partners in a law firm?

It can be very tempting to do an internet search and then base your own services on what your competitors are offering. An analysis of your competitors’ offerings should of course form part of your research, but you should base your own services on what your own research
is telling you that law firms want to buy
and what features will entice them to buy.

In an ideal world, you would be able to quickly sell a very big-ticket piece of work. Unfortunately, until you have built up your credibility and trust with these typically risk-adverse clients, it is very unlikely that they will buy a high-risk service from you.

Therefore, you need to typically have a ‘gateway’ service. This is typically a low-risk service that enables both parties to see whether they can work together. It is different to the ubiquitous ‘exploratory chat’ or ‘confidential discussion’, as it is normally a paid-for service.

Typically for consultancies, these gateways services are normally badged as a ‘review’, ‘audit’, ‘diagnostic’ or ‘strategy’ session. A good gateway service would naturally lead onto a wider programme of works or projects that you would complete with a client. But, when you sign up a client to your gateway service, you should manage its expectations that it would typically lead to more work being done
with you or your firm.

Online branding

Also important is building your online credibility and authority. The world of professional services marketing has changed significantly from the days that
you built up your client portfolio as a
lawyer. The good news is that social
media has made it significantly easier
to build up a profile and reputation as
a law firm management expert.

Regardless of whether you had specialist PR help for your firm, you will likely have already built up an online footprint as managing partner. Your aim, particularly during your transition phase, is to change that footprint so that you are seen as a law firm management expert.

The Hinge Research Institute found that 63.2 per cent of potential buyers of professional services will use a search engine such as Google to check you out. A further 60 per cent of buyers will look at your social media profiles. Only 55.5 per cent of buyers will check the references you have given. At the point that you announce to the world that you are stepping down as managing partner, what do you want your online footprint to say about you?

Spend time thinking about the difficult situations or challenges you faced as managing partner. How did you solve them? What did you learn? With the benefit of hindsight, what would you have done differently? Now take these situations and turn them into case studies and credibility stories. These are stories which start by detailing the problems you faced before talking through the results you helped
to achieve.

Craft yourself a content plan which
will do the following:

• identify what information you will share in which format, when and through what channels (e.g. headlines for your blog, white papers to share with potential clients, articles you will pitch to journalists, video clips on YouTube); and

• plan which bits of content you will produce to help you speed up your sales cycle (these will either answer questions potential clients may have and/or help to overcome possible objections).

Brand building

After you have made it as easy as possible for law firms to buy your services, it is time to get your message out there. The best means of building your profile are:

• networking;

• speaking at conferences and events;

• running webinars and seminars for prospective clients;

• generating positive PR (particularly in the legal press); and

• writing books.

It is unlikely you will have the time to do all of these profile-building tools – and some of them will probably not feel right for you. Think of your marketing plan as a work in progress which develops and grows over time. If your firm has a professional services sector team, join it and use its assistance to help get your message out there.

One of the benefits of having a two-year transition plan is that you can start using some of these tools and building up a pipeline of work before you need it. As Mendelssohn notes, “there is a huge gulf between talking about potentially working together and actually getting paid to work with a firm”.

Mendelssohn wrote Life after Boris as his book-sized business card; he says it helped him to quickly build credibility with potential clients. By contrast, Gillman has focused his business development time mainly on networking (both online and offline) within the professions, as well as blogging and speaking on practice management issues.

Networking success

Your aim is to build up a core group of contacts who also work closely with decision makers in law firms. These people could, if you handle the relationships correctly, be your best source of work. For example, which of your partners is a professional services expert? Can you get him to share his little black book of contacts and make introductions?

When you have identified some key relationships, make sure you build and implement a relationship plan with them
so that you are always ‘top of mind’
with them. This will help you be the
one who gets a call when there is
work to be referred.

Speaking at conferences

It is much easier to pick up (often unpaid) speaking opportunities at conferences as a managing partner at a well-known firm. Once again, this is where a long transition plan can really benefit you. Do actively look for opportunities to speak about practice management issues.

Running seminars and webinars

Seminars and webinars are great tools
to convert prospective clients and also build up your profile. Consider how you can use your current firm’s infrastructure
to help you to run a webinar or seminar that addresses some of the pain points facing law firms.

Generating PR

Your relationships with journalists, particularly with those in the legal press,
will be very important as you transition out of your managing partner role. The more you can help them before you step down, the better.

For example, can you volunteer to be profiled for a feature article? Can you feed ideas for stories to journalists – without being indiscrete about your current firm? How about pitching stories related to
some aspect of law firm management?

These articles and quotes in articles will be incredibly valuable to help you to build up your credibility as a law firm management expert.

Writing a book

To write and properly start marketing a book often takes at least 12 months and isn’t something that can be easily done on top of a demanding day job.

However, if you can find the time to write a book, this can be a brilliant door opener and profile-building asset. One of the benefits of writing a book is that it helps you to crystallise your methodology and intellectual assets.

An established publisher can help you to develop your thoughts and manuscript, and then promote the book to the right audience. Alternatively, you may want to consider self-publication if you are confident that you have the knowledge, skills and contacts to do so.

Long-term plan

In summary, becoming a recognised
expert in law firm management is a long-term project. Re-establishing yourself
as a fee earner in this niche field will
not be easy.

However, with a long-term transition plan and a supportive partnership team,
it can become a fulfilling and lucrative career move.

Heather Townsend and Jon Baker are co-authors of The Go-To Expert
(www.excedia.co.uk). Heather is also author of The FT Guide to Business Networking and co-author of How to
Make Partner and Still Have a Life.