posted 17 Dec 2009 in Volume 12 Issue 7

Profile: Mark Landon

Formerly head of employment law at Royal Mail, London managing partner Mark Landon brings a broad client perspective to the management team at Weightmans as it focuses on further national expansion.

By Richard Brent

There can’t be very many businesses where an organisational change programme has been as wide-ranging and challenging as that currently underway at the monolithic Royal Mail. The 2007 Pay and Modernisation Agreement has notoriously involved a significant increase, both in more flexible working and new forms of technology, to generate efficiencies that will mitigate the ever greater volume of business inevitably ebbing away in favour of e-mail traffic. In recent months, of course, they have been wheels of change that have led to serious friction with the Communication Workers Union and culminated in hotly debated and dissected strike action.

Mark Landon had left his legal role at this famous business to become a partner at one of its law firm panel before 2007, but he feels the general experience of co-ordinating a legal team in such a large enterprise has stood him in especially good stead for leading the London office of Weightmans as it pursues quite a sharp strategic shift of its own.

“What has been really interesting is the challenge of running what is the youngest of our regional offices at a time when the whole firm is very much moving away from being the ‘north-west’ firm it once was, to a position where each office is gradually acquiring its own personality and profile,” he says.

Access all areas

Any law firm will be familiar with an emphasis on the need for efficiency in the current economic climate. In a further ‘take away’ from his previous employer of some 180,000 people, however, another key element of his strategy has been improving communication to ensure a consistent approach to business development across the firm, he explains.

“To state the obvious, Royal Mail is just huge. There is no point in operational managers in one part of the country adopting a particular stance on an issue, only then to find people adopting a different stance elsewhere. One of the real challenges for the legal team was utilising its network of firms to ensure we received consistent messages in all parts of the country.

“Similarly, with a national law firm, you’re missing out on so much if you don’t pass on that nationally-gained experience.”

Landon is therefore campaigning to persuade his fellow partners and fee-earners to see the five offices of Weightmans more as “gateways” than islands. Individuals should be dividing their time between the personal caseloads, naturally extremely demanding in themselves, and the various opportunities to be exploited elsewhere in the network.

“I’m saying to people they have to have two hats. Yes, they’re doing substantive London-based work, but the office should also be a shop window to generate work for the rest of the firm,” he says. “If law firms are to flourish, you need to get lawyers to see themselves as both doers of work and rainmakers at every level.”

He concedes, however, that instilling this attitude across the firm could be especially challenging in a difficult economy, where there may be a perceived need for “lawyers to prove that they, personally, are very busy” to feel secure. Nevertheless, the reality is that Weightmans could well find it generates more work for itself if lawyers avoid this temptation to be too inward-focused, he feels.

“For example, a more cost-effective service might actually mean you are not doing that work yourself personally” he explains. “Some of our clients definitely want their work done in London, but obviously we know City rates can sometimes be quite off-putting. Our ability to offer a two-tier pricing structure using our lower-cost bases in other parts of the country could be very attractive.”

Lessons learned

Suggesting alternative options for clients is also a further example of the sort of management pointers Landon was able to pick up from his ten-year stint at Royal Mail.

“Having been a client, I know you want value for money. One of our primary roles is to be proactive in thinking about how we can offer clients as cost-effective a service as possible. It isn’t just about reacting to a client when it comes to retendering.”

As a general counsel, he says, it was interesting to compare the offerings of law firms including Bond Pearce and Eversheds, and Weightmans itself, in this regard. Service level agreements were obviously in place, but equally the business would be glad to welcome more proactive dialogue if panel firms could see better ways of working together that would ultimately impact upon the bottom line.

He explains: “In an ideal world I think I would like to second every lawyer in private practice to spend six months or so with a client. The really important lesson that being an in-house lawyer teaches you is the need to truly understand what the client does and be part of that team. It’s a useful reminder that a good lawyer is effectively the oil in the machine. Your job is to support and facilitate, but that organisation actually does something else.”

It’s good to talk

While a mandatory secondment scheme might be impractical, however, Landon has used his first year as managing partner to implement a handful of measures aimed at encouraging everyone to take more of what he calls this “big picture” view.

One initiative in the pipeline, for example, is a more extensive roll-out of something set up in his previous three years responsible for building up the London employment practice. He established several forums comprising at least one member of the employment team from each of the five offices. “It’s a practical way of collating our collective national experience, but also just an opportunity to sit down and talk,” he explains.

“You almost can’t communicate too much,” he adds. “You need to be constantly talking and letting people know. Somebody could easily be visiting someone you know, or even someone you’ve always wanted to see. People mustn’t forget to pick up the phone and talk.”

To this end the London office now has an open ‘event diary’ that everybody can check to further facilitate information sharing, while Landon also encourages people to visit other offices periodically for a simple lunch and informal “catch-up”.

“One thing I really want to make sure is that we don’t fail to take advantage of cross-selling opportunities simply because we aren’t talking to each other,” he says.

Forums for all

More formally, a recent series of lunchtime seminars has then enabled each of the firm’s three core business lines − commercial, public sector and insurance − to give presentations on their work to the rest of the office. This was followed by delegations from the other offices coming to London, and most recently a London office ‘roadshow’ touring around the country to keep the firm abreast of developments in its own ongoing and changing workload.

Indeed, forums are a clear cornerstone of Landon’s communications strategy, with other groups recently established for trainees and newly-qualified solicitors to be able to feed back their thoughts. The push also incorporates non-fee-earning departments as well of course, with yet more meetings for the PR team and other support functions to discuss profile-raising possibilities and other general developments. Landon hopes not to have to chair all of these bodies himself in future, and believes it will benefit more junior partners to take on the role in some cases.

“It’s an important aspect of people acquiring their own management experience and thinking a little bit beyond their day-to-day work, joining up with other initiatives,” he explains.

“You can be putting together all these efficiency strategies, but you’ve also got to ask the people who are actually doing the work. Hopefully this will give the groups a structured opportunity to feed back.”

Even though the size of his team has leapt from five to some 100 in just three years, Landon is clear that his in-house leadership experience as team leader at Royal Mail continues to inform this consultative approach. At the postal giant he would often sit on project boards, with some 40 per cent of time spent on “commerce” rather than law per se, he says. In private practice, clients will be seeking important input at specific intervals, but lawyers aren’t usually as close to the overall business goals, he explains.

“I think it does the change the way I try to drive people to help and support clients, because you really need to give clear, practical advice, not deliver an academic essay,” he says. “I do try to instil a focus on practical front-line training.”

He is also particularly experienced as a provider of staff training himself, including advising organisations such as the Royal Institute of Public Health and Royal Society of Medicine on what are timely disability and sickness-management issues. “If Royal Mail taught me anything it’s that preaching from the legal pulpit causes people to lose the will to live in five minutes,” he says. “You have to give examples, and really explain the practical impact of these issues on the individual business.”

Hopes and fears

Landon now hopes that a similarly rigorous client focus, combined with his broad cross-selling push, will help Weightmans to compete with any new entrants to the profession in the form of the long-awaited regime of alternative business structures.

“The challenge is to be proactive and ahead of the game. We’re very open minded, but the reality is that change is coming and law firms have to be prepared to evolve. It sounds glib but I think there will probably be certain developments in the next five years that nobody has anticipated,” he says.

He does think clients are increasingly moving to demand fixed and lower annual fees, but adds that Weightmans is qute fortunate in having the benefit of its amassed experience in the high-volume insurance market when it comes to meeting ever tighter efficiency targets as costs feel the squeeze.

“Technical experience is now a given” he says. “Clients now also ask how you are making the best use of technology. You need the structure to take a high-volume approach where appropriate, and then the expertise to deal with more difficult individual cases.

“I suppose one always has to ask what experience you need to do a particular piece of work. As time passes, clients are rightly asking whether it is right that you can’t take a more commoditised approach. Fortunately we’ve grown used to providing a very cost-effective service and thinking on our feet.”

He thinks that any change in the competitive landscape will also be affected by blows dealt by the downturn, however. Although the credit crunch has impacted Weightmans’ profits and some key practices such as corporate, however, he admits the firm has also been relatively fortunate in this regard, with a fairly broad range of work under its belt. In the 2009 financial year turnover held notably steady, rising from £50m to a record £52m.

Lawyers with commercial nous have proved useful when moved outside their comfort zones, he continues, while the firm also has a number of key public-sector clients on fixed contracts. Royal Mail, for example, has recently extended its own contract with the firm by two years.

“There is certainly no sense of complacency,” he adds quickly. “I expect we’ll be seeing the impact of all this for years – and also in ways we don’t anticipate.

“Any organisation could be looking at law firms and considering its options. Some firms might even be taken over by bigger clients.”

The offer of lower-cost options in an integrated national network is certainly a strong bargaining chip, but as Landon, for one, certainly recognises, most clients now are much more aware that the law is fast tipping to a buyer’s market.