A force for change

When Dawn Dixon and Michael Webster set up Webster Dixon in 1998, Dixon found herself returning to compete in a City environment that she had rejected as a trainee as being too hostile. Since then, the firm has gone from strength to strength, with a second office move in the planning, and staff recruitment continuing apace. Caroline Poynton talks to Dixon about the challenges so far and her aspirations for the future.

I first met Dawn Dixon and Michael Webster in September 2003 when what I had expected would be a short introductory meeting turned into an evening event in which I learnt a lot about these two determined individuals and their fledgling firm. Since then, Webster Dixon has enjoyed continued success. It has been voted on to The Lawyer’s ‘Hot 100’ league 2004 and is currently planning its second office move, necessary to accommodate its steady expansion from just two people in 1998 to 13 today.

Both in that initial meeting and in our interview for this article, Dixon expressed the desire for Webster Dixon to be seen as a successful City law firm, irrespective of gender mix or ethnicity. However, the fact that Webster Dixon is the first black-owned City law firm in a profession that has very few black lawyers, let alone partners, makes it difficult to skirt the issue, especially when you know that both Webster and Dixon devote much of their spare time to numerous community efforts, including the Black Solicitors Network and the Association of Women Solicitors. Indeed, when Dixon talks with such passion about tackling discrimination in the profession, it is clear that Webster Dixon is far from being just another legal practice. It is a law firm that wants to make a difference in the heart of the City.

Dixon’s desire to use her experience of the legal industry to help others comes partly from her early experiences when considering the legal profession as a career. Born in Clapham, London, to West Indian parents, she was educated at a local convent. Her early interest in law was nearly stifled when her career adviser told her that as a member of an ethnic group, she was setting her standards too high in wishing to become a lawyer. Nevertheless, determined, Dixon read law and was interviewed for several City firms. As the first member of her family to take a degree, however, she found it hard, especially when it came to the interviews for articles. “I was competing with people who I felt were more rounded than me, who had been exposed to professionals in their home lives and were more comfortable around them,” she says. “I didn’t feel the City environment was one in which I could excel at that time.” Another difficult issue was that some firms did not realise she was black until the time of the interview. “You don’t know my colour by my voice or name. I met a few people who were surprised when they saw me, which made the interviews uncomfortable. I look back now and find their reactions amusing,” she says.

Such early challenges gave Dixon the opportunity to train with a smaller firm, William Heath & Co, which she believes gave her the essential tools and client exposure for setting up and running her own business. She was the first black woman at William Heath and the second female partner when she was promoted at the age of 28, which can’t have been easy given that Dixon says it was a very traditional firm managed by an ex-army lawyer of a “very different generation to me”. But Dixon is keen to emphasise the benefits of her time with the firm. “I will be forever grateful to them because they saw something in me that other people didn’t and were able to help bring it out,” she says, adding: “I am obviously like a fine wine that improves with age.”

Despite her success at William Heath, deciding to move back to the City to set up her own firm at the relatively young age of 30 was a brave move. However, Michael Webster, who had also been made a partner at Conway & Co, proved a good match for the venture. Dixon met Webster through social functions while they were both young lawyers. Having spent some years referring work to each other, they decided that the next step was to open, as she describes it: “A black-owned firm, in the City, in the belly of the beast.”

More importantly, they were both prepared to make the necessary sacrifices to achieve their dream and both considered moving back home with their parents, renting out their homes and using their savings to help ensure that they didn’t draw too much from the business. Indeed, they did not need to borrow money until they moved offices, three years after the firm’s launch. “We put in the capital to last six to nine months, to pay for everything, including salaries and drawings, in the hope work would come in and the fees would pay for bills,” she explains. “If you can’t pay your bills from your fees, then don’t take out a loan because you’re doing something wrong with your service.”

Starting a business is never simple. Both Dixon and Webster had restrictive covenants from the firms they left, so they couldn’t take clients with them. However, when they moved into their new offices in December 1997, client post was already waiting for them, before trading commenced in January 1998. They also received referrals from lawyer friends and relatives, and now Dixon says the business is doing very nicely, with around 3,500 clients, including small to medium companies, entrepreneurs, dotcoms, radio stations and private individuals, some of which have 40/50 matters.

Of course, success inevitably means expansion, which might have proved difficult for a partnership like Webster Dixon that was founded on a vision and dream of just two people. Dixon says that if anything, recruitment has been one of the biggest challenges. “As entrepreneurs, you have a vision, and when other people join, you have to get them to sing from the same hymn book,” she says. The answer has been to implement systems to ensure that staff act in a certain way and are meeting in-house standards in client service and behaviour should either Dixon or Webster be out of the office. Dixon also believes firms need to take more time to ensure that they get the recruitment process right. “It’s better to spend extra hours interviewing than paying £5,000 to an agency, employing the wrong person, and then having to unravel the mess later. The wrong staff can seriously affect a small business like mine,” she says.

From the way in which Dixon talks about Webster and having met them both, I know that their personalities make an excellent combination, and the success of the business so far proves that they are doing something right. I wonder, however, how they will cope with the challenge of recruiting to partnership level when they have to bring somebody else into the heart of the business.

Dixon thinks the first step to addressing this challenge is to better understand their own strengths and weaknesses, something that she is currently considering through psychometric testing. By applying the method to herself first, she hopes to confirm the value of such tools, before considering extending them to others already in or joining the business. She is also looking at the benefits of life coaches, for her staff to bring out their needs and their plans for their future and how Webster Dixon can facilitate that. In this way, she feels that she can best combine the various personalities and ambitions of the firm’s people, and ensure that the right steps are taken for ensuring that all staff members work within the culture and values of Webster Dixon.

While such steps might seem outlandish to some, such ideas demonstrate a keen desire in Dixon to manage their employees effectively. One of the things that she is most proud of is taking trainees through to qualification because she knows that she has then made a difference to their professional lives. “I’ve often said that the legal profession is suffering from PMS: it’s pale, male and stale. If you don’t fit into the dominant culture, then you’re perceived to be at a disadvantage. On the contrary, we have taken on a mix of trainees: black/white, male and female. Some were rejected by the City, but all have become excellent lawyers,” she says.

Her work with trainees compliments her community work with the Association of Women Solicitors (of which she is the former London chair), the Council for Education in World Citizenship, Global Graduates Training, as well as the LPC panel at the College of Law and the Legal Services Commission. She thinks that it is likely that in the future she will do less fee-earning work to manage the firm and its people, but for the moment, she is happy balancing the numerous responsibilities to ensure that the firm grows in a way that makes the most of everybody’s potential.

While very confident in her own position and that of the firm, Dixon is still clearly working some things out. Hence, she revels in describing her day-to-day involvement in the successes of her trainees and is proud of the chances she has given to people who might otherwise have failed to get a place in the City. On the other hand, however, she practically recognises the need for an office manager or accounts clerk who can act as a buffer between herself and the rest of the staff so that she and Webster can be free to progress their vision and careers without being bogged down with the day-to-day problems in the firm.

Balancing Dixon’s responsibilities to the firm’s people, while driving the business direction of the firm as a whole, will naturally prove difficult as the business evolves, especially with the firm’s current pace of change. As Dixon says: “We try to work forward and we have quarterly and yearly plans, as well as weekly partner meetings. But every time we get to where we think we need to be, we find ourselves somewhere else again. And while it’s quite exciting that the goal posts are always moving, it is sometimes so dramatic that the whole game changes and we find that we’re no longer playing cricket but rugby.” It seems a fitting analogy for a firm that is still finding its feet in the market but, with Webster and Dixon’s determination and enthusiasm to make it work, combined with their efforts to make a real difference in society, it looks likely that Webster Dixon will continue to impress itself upon a profession that is more renowned for its elitist traditions than its ability to change.