A single-source solution: Making a law firm into a commercial hub for clients

When Crowell & Moring opened its London office, managing partner Peter Teare had his work cut out. But a solid strategy of cross-selling and commercial focus has created a European business that could well claim that elusive prize of being truly differentiated from its competitors. Caroline Poynton gets the inside story.

Can you tell me more about the development of the London office of Crowell & Moring?

I have to confess that it had a lot more to do with being opportunistic than any carefully thought out strategic plan.

I had spent five years working with Crowell & Moring in Washington between 1998 and 1991. While I enjoyed and benefited from that experience, I knew that I did not want to stay in the US permanently and, after five years, it was time to come home. I can remember a casual conversation in the hallway with Took Crowell (our founding partner) who said that if I was going to go back to London, I should open up an office for the firm to serve as a bridgehead into Europe.

I was well liked and respected by the lawyers at Crowell & Moring and wanted to maintain the professional and personal relationships that I had developed at the firm. I could also see the potential among the US client base for developing a European practice. So we opened in London without much further discussion, without any formal business plan and, at that time, with no clients.

From that humble start – it was just me and a secretary – we were able to develop a practice by extending existing US client relationships in a European direction. In the early days, our typical client was a US multinational that had sales and marketing and, possibly, manufacturing operations in Europe, but had no corporate presence or in-house lawyers on the ground. We quickly found that the general counsel of a number of our major US clients were frustrated with their existing relationship with lawyers in London, whom they found to lack the responsiveness and commercial awareness that they found among their US lawyers. In some cases, getting new work was like taking candy from a baby because the general counsel was very happy to redirect work in Europe to a trusted firm that understood and met the firm’s service expectations.

Our first business objective was simply to build a self-sustaining practice in Europe that extends and deepens our existing client relationships. We aimed to capture the work that was flowing from our major US clients to other law firms in London. When we opened our office in Brussels in 1999, the initial objective was the same for that market.

We have now achieved those goals in both London and Brussels, and last year adopted a more formal (but short) business plan that established a new set of five objectives for our European practice:

Maintain a profitable practice in Europe that shares the same standards of excellence and culture as our offices in the US;
Grow our offices in London and Brussels to thirty lawyers each;
Expand the cross-generation of revenues between the European and US offices;
Increase the European revenues generated by the European offices to levels that match or exceed the European revenues generated by the US offices;
Increase the productivity of the European lawyers to comparable levels to US lawyers, while taking account of the differing productivity standards that are considered the norm in the respective cities in which we maintain offices.

In short, we want to continue to expand our representation of American clients in London and Brussels but, at the same time, want to become less dependent upon the US client base as the source of our revenues in Europe. We aim to achieve that by attracting more local partners with local business, practising in areas where we have an existing reputation and expertise in our US offices.

How would you describe the culture of the office and the firm as a whole?

The strong culture of the firm is what, I believe, stands us apart from most other law firms. It is what makes Crowell & Moring a good place to work and a hard place to leave. It is rare thing that we have a partner leave to join another firm.

We are an unpretentious and irreverent group of individuals who take our work – but not ourselves – seriously. We work hard, but not too hard because we maintain a respect for the importance of home lives of our lawyers and staff.

The firm’s logo is a rubber duck, which came about after some comedian decided to fill the fountain in our main reception with these little yellow beasts. The ducks have stayed because they seem just right for us.

The culture of the firm has a lot to do with its history. 2004 is Crowell & Moring’s 25th anniversary. The partnership was founded in Washington as a break away from Jones Day with 53 lawyers. At that time, we were predominantly a US ‘government contracts’ practice. The firm enjoyed a first-class client list, which included most of the major US defence and aerospace companies – but we were servicing those clients in a narrow field of practice. The successful growth of the firm has depended on the ability of our partners to cross-sell the talents of other partners to our existing clients.

That cross-selling culture drives the way we do business today, and distinguishes Crowell & Moring from many other firms.

How has this culture been applied to meeting clients’ needs in a European marketplace?

We enjoy a number of very long-standing client relationships. I am sure that a part of the reason for the loyalty shown by those clients is that they like the culture of the firm, and can see that we run a happy ship with a team of motivated and talented lawyers.

More importantly, in a European context, we try to show a willingness to do more for our clients that European lawyers traditionally do. We make the effort to go to visit our clients and (at our own cost) learn their business, understand their commercial environment, and know their objectives. We undertake a proactive style of representation – alerting clients to legal and policy issues that are going to affect their business. For many businesses, we provide eyes and ears within the European market and its institutions. For the general counsel who sits thousand of miles away, the fact that we are looking out for their interests and will call about an issue, before being asked, provides added value.

Indeed, for some of our US clients that are doing business in Europe, which do not have any lawyers or other corporate function here, we assume the role of their European general counsel. This has been a very successful business model for us.

At the most mundane level, this means looking after the statutory books and making sure all the filings in all the countries in which the client does business are made on time. But, by working with correspondent law firms throughout Europe, we can manage all the client’s legal-service requirements in Europe. We provide a simple single point of contact and we take care of managing the outside law-firm relationships within Europe.

Clients like this arrangement because they know that we have built a good network of specialists from different law firms in each European jurisdiction that we know and trust. By providing a one-stop shop for advice on European business law and regulation, we offer a solution for those international businesses that do not want to have to find and then manage multiple law-firm relationships in a different continent.

Our ability to offer a single source for the solution of European legal issues, tailored to the needs of multinational companies, has been a major factor in the successful development of our European practice.

What steps have you had to take on an internal level to ensure this consultative client relationship is maintained?

That’s simple. We try to develop as many different points of contact at as many different levels within our respective organisations as possible, and make sure that our lawyers take the time to physically visit the clients at their place of work to learn and understand their business.

Our goal should always be to make the individual with whom we are working look good in the eyes of their boss. If we can achieve that, we will have a happy and loyal client – but we can only do that if we get to know that individual and understand the challenges that he or she faces in her work.

It is important that communications with the clients are not limited to high-level partner contacts. We want to become an extension of the client’s law department and to do that we must become as integrated as possible. We try to make sure that personal relationships exist among all levels, including secretaries, paralegals and junior lawyers, and partners.

We also make sure that, on a practice level, we are fully integrated among our various offices. Apart from ensuring that we provide better client services, it means that we are better able to identify and exploit cross-selling opportunities within the practice groups when they arise. As a practice matter, this means that we encourage our lawyers to visit their colleagues in our other European and US offices on a regular basis.

What difficulties have you encountered along the way and how have you gone about tackling them?

The greatest challenge is to encourage some of the lawyers that we recruit from traditional English firms to change the way that they relate to clients. Our proactive, informal style of practice often means that we expect our lawyers to adopt a far more commercial approach to the practice of law than they may have become accustomed to. Our clients expect us to do more than traditional legal analysis. They also expect us to come off the fence and make an assessment of risk and apply some commercial judgement to the problems they face. The decision to assume any particular risk will ultimately be made by the client, but our clients expect us to express a view and make a recommendation.

Many lawyers are uncomfortable doing more than opining on the law and do not want to assume the role of trusted business adviser – but we have a rule in our office that in any written work that goes to a client, the first must state the question and the second sentence must give a clear answer or recommendation. That conclusion can be followed by pages of legal analysis with footnotes, but right up front we must give the client some clear practical advice based upon that analysis.

Internally, we have to make sure that we have internal structures, mechanisms and incentives in place to facilitate and encourage cross-selling. A part of this is dealt with through the partner-compensation structure that recognises and rewards partners that generate work for other partners, but we also have standing committees and practice groups that work with the marketing team to continually monitor the opportunities to market our capabilities to existing clients. Much of our marketing is inward looking.

What are your goals for the coming months/years and how do you intend to go about achieving them?

I am happy with the business model that we have developed in Europe. Our goal is simply to make it bigger. We have no ambitions to open new offices in Europe, but we have taken space in London and Brussels to accommodate thirty lawyers in each place. I want to fill both offices with productive and happy lawyers by the end of 2005.

Peter Teare is managing partner of the London office of Crowell & Moring. He can be contacted at PTeare@crowell.com