Racing to the top

Jonathan Fox first experienced the joys of the legal profession when he joined DLA as marketing manager in 1997. Seven years on, and he is heading up Holborn firm Collyer-Bristow as its first non-lawyer chief executive. It is a progression that demonstrates his desire to lead and his enthusiasm for the business of law. Caroline Poynton finds out if he can live up to his ambitions to make a successful impact on a firm that is steeped in tradition.

The traithlon is a gruelling test of physical and mental stamina, where muscles react painfully to the transitions between swimming, cycling and running, and the mind has to be singularly focused to overcome an inclination to give up.

In the Autumn of 2000, Jonathan Fox, a successful business professional at DLA, was competing in just such an event in France. As always, it was tough, but he had trained hard and all was going well.

The recent call he had received from a headhunter suggesting he talk to a firm in Holborn about becoming its chief executive was far from his mind. Yes, he had been thinking of a career change and was even considering going back to his roots in retail, but for now there was little more to think about than powering forwards and getting the next transition right. Just as he was settling into the pace of things, however, disaster struck.

A near fatal accident on his bike landed Fox in hospital and suddenly he had plenty of time to think about the past and future. He had already experienced plenty of variety in his career to date. He travelled down from Leeds to London after A Levels and what should have been a summer’s work experience before university turned into a six-year stint working as a trader in the City. He finally made it to university in 1991, but he still managed to expand his working horizons by spending one summer working on the stock exchange and the other on a specialist project for a fish importer. On graduation, he accepted the offer of a job at Boots and was soon surprising friends and family with his extensive knowledge of ladies’ cosmetics won from heading up part of the company’s No 7 brand.

Moving from Boots to a law firm in 1997 might have seemed a strange choice, given the staid reputation of law compared to retail, but the thought of becoming marketing manager for a firm with the ambitions and energy of DLA had proved an opportunity too good to be missed. And, now, lying at this fundamental crossroads in his career, Fox had to admit that he had thoroughly enjoyed spending the past three years helping to transform that firm into one of the most promising business ventures in the UK. The question was whether he was really ready to move from the dizzy heights of DLA to another law firm, but this time a distinctly smaller operation hidden in a leafy square in a quiet part of Holborn.

Indeed, Fox was barely patched up when he first met Collyer Bristow’s senior partner Roger Woolfe, which might explain his agreement to downsize from the big league. But Fox remembers things differently. “I got the same feeling that I got in 1997 at DLA that these people were collegiate, good fun and really wanted to do something with the business,” he says. Fox admits that the culture was very different to DLA and nothing could illustrate the point more than the listed building in which the firm has been resident for 160 years. The offer letter was promising, however, with Woolfe saying that they were looking forward to Fox “ruffling them up a bit”. With his recovery well underway, Fox soon found himself looking forward to a new phase in his career as chief executive at Collyer Bristow.

It is little surprise Collyer Bristow chose Fox for a leadership role, as business professionals are increasingly recruited at the highest levels of law firms. Even Fox’s first boss at Boots is now about to start as marketing manager at Addleshaw Goddard, reflecting the burgeoning trend among firms looking for broader industry experience to drive business strategy. Fox sums up the obvious reasons for this when he say that his chief lesson at Boots was in how to make money, which he did by spending a lot of time looking at client behaviour. He now employs the same principles at Collyer Bristow. “I can’t talk about the law,” he says. “The first thing I talk about is money.”

For many lawyers, however, the thought of approaching a potential client and discussing money remains abhorrent, but Fox argues that lawyers should be more confident in this respect. “Most [lawyers] would be honest and admit that they’re uncomfortable with going out and discussing services or money. Most clients, however, absolutely love it,” he says. By helping Collyer-Bristow’s lawyers to sell the firm’s services and think like business people, Fox may well succeed in creating a differentiated business proposition. After all, it is a proactive approach that few firms are embracing, despite the competitive pressures facing the legal industry.

To say that most law firms are backward, however, does little justice to those firms that are pushing ahead. Indeed, business managers like Fox would have little interest in the legal industry if there were few opportunities for interesting challenges or business advancement. For instance, Fox’s time at DLA was a lynchpin for his long-term commitment to the legal profession. “There’s a lack of complacency at DLA,” he says. “Some of the things we tried to do were pretty cutting edge in terms of pitching for work and client care and if you lost out on a deal, you’d go back and review what you’d done and learn from your mistakes.” He also has no end of praise for Nigel Knowles, who he maintains is the reason why DLA has done so well. While those experiences may have reinforced his decision to join Collyer-Bristow and perhaps make his own mark as a leader within law, there was also the lure of having the freedom to innovate, which Fox says is far more difficult to do within the more rigid structures of retail. “Being in a law firm might not seem exciting, but I disagree. If business had the hard-work ethic and energy that a lot of law firms have, they’d make a lot more money,” he says.

Since he has been with Collyer-Bristow, he has worked hard to employ some of the ideas he has taken from his time in business. A new management structure was put in place in October 2001, which stripped down previously cumbersome processes. By setting up an executive, including Fox, the senior partner and finance director, supported by a supervisory board, which acts as a sounding block for partners, decisions could be taken and acted upon more speedily. Combined with a simple business plan with measurable milestones to improve the firm’s client management, Fox maintains that the firm has been able to improve dramatically since 2000, even completing its 2004 business plan a year early.

It all sounds promising, but Fox admits that he has learnt as much from managing a law firm as he has given back in outside industry experience. “When you come into a business like this, you believe that everybody has the same motivations as you but not everybody does. It's been the most difficult and best learning experience to know that there are people who are massively ambitious and those that are not. And, in a successful business, you need that mix of people. If all your people are driven, it would be a nightmare,” he says. As a leader, he has also learnt how fragile confidence and team spirit can be, without which, no business can be successful. And to maintain that spirit, understanding the important balance of personalities has been essential. “Your stars might not be the people billing the most or winning all the new clients. They might be the ones who prevent clients leaving,” he says. “The problem is that it is very difficult to identify those that are keeping everything ticking along nicely. From a management point of view, we’re not trained to do that.” The key, he says, is not to be blinded by the lights, but to take a more measured approach to people and business.

With the combination of his experience and the enthusiasm of the firm’s lawyers, Fox is very positive about the future and, as the firm prepares to expand into the building next door, Fox’s ability to talk money seems to be paying dividends. There are also signs that the appointment of Fox might have happened at just the right time, as one of the firm’s major clients, Philip Morris, has similarly recruited a non lawyer to the position of director of legal services. The intention is to better manage the legal budget and assess the value, or otherwise, of its external counsel. Its law-firm panel will have to be ready to respond to this added scrutiny and competitive tensions may be rife. But Collyer-Bristow, with Fox’s similar business head at its helm, might just have the advantage to win this particular race for client satisfaction.