Profile: Ken Dixon

Derby-based law firm Flint Bishop Solicitors has increased its turnover from ₤5m to ₤13m in less than five years. Managing partner Ken Dixon tells Richard Brent how they did it.

When East Midlands law firm Flint Bishop Solicitors recently asked clients how the firm was perceived as part of a re-brand, one of the main – and most pleasing – traits identified was a tendency for individuals to “undersell themselves”. Managing partner Ken Dixon explains that the firm has always sought to be “friendly and unpushy” – it is the essence of its culture. Indeed, with his relaxed and markedly unassuming manner, it is a culture he could well be imagined to embody himself.

Comforting as this client verdict was, however, Dixon accepts it is important for businesses to stretch themselves and stray from their familiar territory. As competition in the legal profession increases, some law firms are certainly aware they may even need to innovate to survive – including, in some cases, behaving more like other businesses than they may have been used to in the past. “There’s always a need to make sure you step out of your comfort zone to attract new business and new clients,” Dixon says.

Indeed Flint Bishop is no stranger to this transition, having garnered impressive plaudits from a number of quarters in recent months and being thrust firmly into the spotlight for achievements that include boosting revenue by 47 per cent, from ₤8m to ₤13.5m, in 2005-2006. Moreover, in the four to five years that Dixon has been managing partner, turnover shot up to its current level from ₤5m. The increase sees it enter the top 150 firms in the UK for the first time, and now the firm is in the running for a Managing Partners Forum (MPF) European Practice Management Award. It is shortlisted in the category of Mould Breaking Firm of The Year, and waits with fingers crossed until the winners are announced in October.

More management

With the assistance of senior partner Ian Beardmore, Dixon is recognised as the driving force behind much of this success – and what he calls a “big change in terms of culture at the firm over the past eight years”. Significantly, this includes internal restructuring to reduce the number of equity partners from 15 to six out of a total 22. “There’s now a collection of very like-minded individuals driving towards a common goal,” he explains.

Some three years ago Dixon also decided to stop fee-earning himself and focus exclusively on the firm’s management, with Beardmore largely following suit in 2006. He doesn’t see it in a seismic shift for the firm, however, and was happy to hand over his personal-injury practice to lawyer Zaf Bashir to head up. He recalls: “I’d worked with Zaf since he was a trainee. He’s an exceptionally bright PI lawyer and thoroughly deserved to take over the role. It also allowed me to free up my time for management.

“It was just one of those things that became obviously necessary, although there was a strangeness at first. As a fee-earner you have your various files and they dictate what work you will do in a day. Whereas, when you step into the world of the management, there’s suddenly a proportion of your day that comes to you and usually arrives on your desk unannounced.”

He is clear, however, that neither management, nor growth, should fundamentally change the way the firm operates. He doesn’t want the culture compromised, and indeed Flint Bishop has shunned a number of merger suggestions under his leadership to stay true to its identity. Preserving this is the main challenge accompanying the growth that is otherwise so good for the firm.

“The larger you get, the more corporatisation does start to sneak into the process. We’ve had to be very careful that doesn’t infect the culture. You encounter glitches of course, but by and large this is still a very happy place to work, which is something I’m particularly proud of,” Dixon says. It is a culture that also helped the firm to come top in the country in the second survey on employee diversity carried out by the Law Society for the Black Solicitors Network and Commission for Racial Equality. Over two-thirds of all Flint Bishop legal posts are held by women, with ten per cent filled by lawyers from ethnic-minority backgrounds. “Our culture is a relaxed and supportive one,” Dixon explains.

Further evidence of this relaxed approach is that Dixon doesn’t want the revised management role to mean he is intimately involved in all the minutiae of the firm’s operations. Rather his instinct is to delegate responsibility to those best equipped to make decisions. “Something I say to people an awful lot is ‘can I add value to that?’ If I can’t, I tell them to go away and do it themselves. As a managing partner I think you need to be able to add value to decisions. If you can’t, you should let others do it. Why pay people to do something and then control what they do or say?”

Marketing moves

A good example of this autonomy in practice is the firm’s new head of marketing, Carl Weston. Weston joined Flint Bishop from Nottingham law firm Freeth Cartwright in April 2007, and he now plans to introduce a few changes of his own. These include making key seminars for clients – in areas such as licensing and property litigation – available in MP3 format and downloadable from the firm’s website, as well as shorter, more sector-specific client newsletters.

The biggest recent marketing challenge began under Weston’s predecessor Bev Cook, however – a complete corporate re-brand that took around six months to complete, culminating in March 2006.

“We moved offices about five years ago and re-branded simply in terms of look, but we also wanted a much deeper re-branding exercise, really reaching into the firm’s culture,” Dixon says. In addition to dropping the last name from Flint Bishop and Barnett, the firm used an external company to carry out a client survey. New colour was subsequently added in the firm’s standard type face to reflect the “warmth” and “friendly and approachable” feel mentioned in the feedback.

When it came to the creative process, however, Dixon again took his preferred approach of allowing those most qualified and experienced to make the necessary decisions. He explains: “There was a personal interest on my and Ian’s part, but we thought it only right to pass in onto marketing. We dipped into the process, but only at key strategic points along the line. Aside from that, we let them get on with it.”

In the event, he adds, the views of management and marketing coincided at these times, but Flint Bishop is also sensitive to the power of branding in general. Its strategy of ‘whitelabelling’ legal services, for instance – offering services to an organisation but under that organisation’s own brand – implicitly recognises the importance of image and its ability to attract business. The firm even offers services such as will-writing and personal-injury advice to members of The Labour Party under the banner of Labour Legal Services. All the services are offered at discounted rates to the party’s members, including a free basic will.

Dixon says: “Whitelabelling allows an organisation to maintain control of the brand at point of entry and enhance membership loyalty – subject of course to service-delivery expectations being met. Members are warmed to the idea of using the services, and our service is, in effect, endorsed by the organisation.”

Creating commodities

He adds that this mutually-beneficial relationship has, “to all practical intent”, accelerated the eventual effect of the Legal Services Bill that is on its way through parliament. Set to allow a wider range of businesses to offer legal services to consumers, this proposed legislation has raised fears among some that firms at the smaller end of the legal market will prove unable to compete with bigger businesses in terms of price. But while he concedes the Bill could land on some smaller practices “with some bang”, Dixon doesn’t see any great terror in the threat posed by ‘Tesco law’.

“The reality is that most firms would be willing to work to very lean profit margins for volume referrals – not far
short of single figures. So why would organisations go to the bother of setting up their own legal-services operation when they can get the lion’s share of profits through a referral fee?” Dixon asks

In any case, Flint Bishop is already ahead of the game when it comes to commoditised legal services available online. Flints Direct, its recently launched online-conveyancing service, is expected to turn over ₤1-1.5m this year, and this was followed by a similar wills service launched in early 2007. “It seemed a natural step to be able to deliver a conveyancing service in a more price-effective way,” he explains.

With his tendency to tell others in the firm to ‘do it themselves’ if they can, it is little wonder Dixon can see the appeal the internet may hold for consumers of legal services. “Rather than going to a lawyer’s office on two occasions, our system allows people to make a will by phone, anywhere in the country, in about 15 minutes,” he enthuses. Moreover, with the options of downloading or completing forms online, he adds it is a “friendly” way to complete a will – not ruling out lawyer contact, of course, but minimising it if so desired. As well as being user-friendly, it could also be seen as one example of the firm “underselling” itself.