112 - How to Build a Good Law Firm Culture For Future Generations

Éamon is co-owner of Briffa, a boutique IP practice with offices in London and Dublin. He is interested in soft IP (especially trademarks, copyright, and design rights), data protection, information technology, and commercial law.

Éamon advises a broad range of businesses in IP rich sectors, from fashion to technology. The Legal500 and the World Intellectual Property Review recommend him. Briffa is also recognised as a Leading Firm by the Legal500 and won the Boutique Law Firm of the Year at the Modern Law Awards in 2023.

In this episode Éamon gives us amazing insights into how to build a good law firm culture for the next generation of lawyers.

To find out more about Éamon and Briffa go to: https://www.briffa.com/

Proudly edited with finesse by Mike at Making Digital Real ✨

Transcript

Welcome to the Law Firm Owners Podcast. I am your host, Dan Warburton. If you are a law firm equity member, partner, CEO or MD who wants to increase your profit while reducing your workload, then you are in the right place.

It's the skills that I needed to become a leader. Yeah. I'm so happy that I've met you in my life.

You've spoken about the revenue increase. It went from like 70,000 to nearly half a million. What percentage increase is that? It's over 400% in that range.

Our monetary returns have been insane. And what we have made in extra profit as compared to what we spent on you is incomparable. You've just trebled the firm's profits in one year.

Yeah. Are you getting what I'm saying? After working with Dan for a few months, my income is up. My happiness is up.

This has changed my whole life. Welcome to the Law Firm Owners Podcast with your host, myself, Dan Warburton. I'm here with Éamon.

And Éamon is a co-owner of Briffa, a boutique IP practice with firms in London and Dublin. His interests are in soft IP, especially trademarks, copyright and design rights, data protection and also information technology and commercial law. Éamon advises a broad range of businesses in IP, rich sectors from fashion to technology.

He is recommended by the Legal 500 and the World Intellectual Property Review. Briffa is also recognized as a leading firm by the Legal 500 and was the winner of the Boutique Law Firm of the Year at the Modern Law Awards in 2023. So that's a massive achievement.

And today, what we're looking at is how to build a good law firm culture for the next generation of lawyers. Éamon, it's brilliant to have you here. Well, thanks for having me.

Yeah, it's a really interesting topic, talking about culture. One of the very, very important things about good culture, I think, is transparency and honesty. So I'm going to start with a tweak, a correction.

It's Éamon rather than Éamon. So Éamon like Matt Damon. Éamon, okay.

See, we've already built trust. We've already built Briffa. Yeah, and that reminds me.

Yeah, and before future episodes, always ask my guests, how do I pronounce your name? Yeah, well, you can be Éamon, because it's an Irish name, so you can be forgiven for, yeah, it's not like John Smith or anything. Well, look, Éamon, I'm really interested to know how can somebody who's so into intellectually minded, noodly stuff end up becoming someone who's built such a great reputation for building great firms across, great cultures across their firms and end up winning awards? Yeah, well, it's a good question, and it has sort of a long and circuitous answer, if you like, which is a bit about me and a bit about Briffa, and I'll try and give you the relatively short version. So my background, I guess, is I trained in a big law firm in Ireland, qualified as a solicitor, moved to the UK, moved to London, and at the time, I was working for very, very big law firms.

I worked for the equivalent of a Magic Circle firm in Dublin, and I worked for an American law firm when I first moved here. And one of the reasons that I moved to a sort of a small boutique firm, which Briffa is, was because I wanted to have certainly a different culture. I don't want to say which is better or worse, but certainly I wanted a sort of a more intimate culture and the culture that comes with working for a small business.

And so I found that at Briffa. So that's the first piece. And I guess the second aspect of the answer relates to Briffa itself.

Briffa is a firm that's been around for sort of 30 years, started in January 1995. And when Briffa was founded or started by its founder, Margaret Briffa, again, a huge part of its raison d'être was culture. And specifically concentrating on working with small businesses, stripping away all those barriers that traditionally stood in the way of small businesses and individual creatives accessing legal service.

So it was about a personal approach. It was about not being corporate, not speaking to clients in a way that made them feel sort of condescended to, or made them feel like legal services weren't for them, or intellectual property rights and assets weren't for them. And a big part of that is how you speak to people, how you present yourself.

And so I guess for us, culture is at the center of that. If you have a good culture internally, and if that culture is authentic, then you're naturally going to radiate that out. You're going to project that out to the people who you're doing business with, your clients.

And so, yeah, here we are, 30 years later, we're running this intellectual property law firm. And you say, how or why are intellectual property lawyers interested in good culture? And it's for precisely that reason. The people and businesses who are most in need of intellectual property law advice are creative people.

They're inventors, they're artists, they're designers. And those people, we're sort of trying to attract them. So if they're creative, and if they're inventive, and if they have interest in that kind of thing, we need to be like that too.

So to attract people who, or at least we think that's our sort of philosophy. If you want to attract people who are entrepreneurial and creative and inventive, you have to similarly exhibit those traits. And I think that starts with having a good culture.

Yeah, great. What I like is how you say, how if you focus on building a great culture internally with each other, then you radiate that. In other words, it gets experienced by the clients and the people that come to you.

Because, you know, there's many law firms out there that they've got this great front they put on for the clients. They smile, they turn up in their nice suits, whatever else. Whereas internally, there's loads of backstabbing, bitching, you know, gossip going on.

And that must affect the performance of the firm as a whole in regards to attracting ideal clients and generating those great profit margins, right? Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I think that's right.

And I think there's two aspects to it. There's the aspect that you mentioned, which is how does that impact clients? And I certainly think that's true. If you have a really, really nice website and a really, really good front and you sort of talk a good game, but then the experience of working with you from the client's perspective is either you're actually really difficult to communicate with after that first meeting or it's really difficult to get a hold of the partner who you thought you were going to be working with.

Or you get sort of moved around from pillar to post as a trainee or a paralegal or a different lawyer dealing with you on different days. People aren't answering emails. You know, it's really expensive if you're being charged on the clock.

All of those things undermine everything you said about your culture at that initial meeting and chip away at it to the point where the client gets really frustrated and says, actually, these aren't the people I thought I was dealing with. I want to go and deal with someone that feels a bit more authentic, that I feel like I have a direct connection with, that I feel sort of gets me and my business. Yeah.

And communicates with me the way I want to be communicated with. The other aspect is how it affects employees internally. And I think that's a huge thing as well because if a firm has a good client retention, it speaks volumes to clients about what that business is like.

If staff turnover is really, really high, clients notice that. They recognize that, oh, I've been working with this firm for four or five years and I've had 10 lawyers. You know, something is happening.

And again, the whole cultural thing, if you sort of say outwardly, we're this firm with this really good culture, we've got all this nice stuff on our website, and actually that doesn't reflect the culture internally. And as you say, you know, there's a lot of politics, there's a lot of toxicity, people work really unsociable hours. You know, the firm is particularly good when it comes to, I don't know, making adjustments for family, for example, people who need to leave early to do pick up or to come in late to do drop off, that kind of stuff.

If the lawyers feel like the job isn't as it was advertised and they feel like they've been almost sort of misled or missold, then they're going to leave. At some point, they're going to start to look at their work-life balance and say, I want to go somewhere else. So yeah, absolutely.

The culture that you sort of project out into the world has to be authentic. It has to reflect what's actually happening within those four walls. And if it doesn't, ultimately you're going to get found out.

Clients are going to notice and employees are going to sort of vote with their feet. Yeah, I love everything you're saying. And it's just reminding me how vital it is to work towards creating a good work culture for the performance of everyone within the team, for, you know, not having such a high staff turnover, people, you know, investing their energy, their time, their effort, being loyal towards the firm and also to then radiate that great culture with the way the clients feel treated.

Yeah. What I'm wondering though is with the work that I do, it's all about showing law firm owners how to delegate away their workload down to their team members because, you know, classically law firm owners try doing lots of billable work, ignore their team, they're not available for anyone and all of this and then they end up burnt out and exhausted and the only way they can earn more is by working even harder. So I free them of that.

But how do you think a law firm owner can delegate away their workload to their team members? Now the team members deal directly with the client but still the client have a great experience, you know, of the culture in that firm. Well, I think the first part of it is what you've just said is that you have to empower junior lawyers to sort of be at the front and be in control of the client relationship to an extent. Otherwise they never grow.

They, you know, they become very good technical lawyers but they're effectively just legal robots. They never develop the soft skills that you don't really learn at school or university or law school. They don't learn to think like partners.

They don't learn to think like, you know, people managers. They don't develop those soft skills about how you communicate bad news to people, how you sort of upsell. Lawyers don't really like the idea of selling but we do all the time.

We're sales people. So yeah, we're sold on that. You know, we've drank that Kool-Aid.

My business partner and myself don't really do any billable work. We sort of move everything down to the juniors. And at Briffa, there's two lawyers on every matter.

There's a supervising partner which is, you know, me or one of my partners and then there's the other lawyer on the team. And they're doing all the billing. They're doing all the work.

They have the conduct of the client relationship. We're retaining overall supervision and control of everything. We'll be in meetings.

We'll advise. We'll sort of assist internally. But yeah, that's sort of the first thing I would say is that structure that you obviously already advise on.

I think that's really important because you need to create an environment where people can learn. And people do need a sense of purpose. They need a sense that they're sort of building their own practice.

They're building their own business. They don't want to feel like they're being robbed of learning opportunities or billing, frankly, which is the way law firms tend to measure success. How do you handle providing that purpose to team members to feel like they're building their own thing without feeling like they're going to run off with the clients? Yeah, I mean, it's a good question.

I guess you still have to retain overall supervision and control. So the clients on the outside always see that, you know, we're still here. And I think part of what you're doing is you're building a really strong firm brand and firm culture.

So while we want them to know their Briffa lawyer, John Smith, Mary Smith, whoever it is, a lot of the clients that we're working with have come to us in the first place because they know the brand. They found us online. We have a really strong presence on Google.

We're recognized by the Legal 500. We get lots of referrals from trade associations and people who have been working with us for a long time. And then people who have been with us for a long time are probably with us because they know the brand.

They know the culture. They know we're an IP boutique. We're sort of well-recognized in the UK and elsewhere.

We're experts at what we do. It's sort of wall-to-wall IP here every day so they know that they can rely on us. So, yeah, I think building, you know, maintaining visibility and having a really good, having a really good firm culture is one way that you can ensure that the clients don't go with people when they leave.

The other way to sort of try and do that is prevent people from leaving. Your staff will incentivize them to stay. The short, harsh reality and the short, harsh answer to your question is you can never guarantee that clients aren't going to go anywhere.

That is the nature of life. Clients are free to go with whoever they want to go with. And if they want to leave, they're going to leave.

But I guess the way that we've structured our business as well is we sort of split the business in two. So, you know, some of our work comes from a small number of very, very large clients and then a huge amount of our business is from a very, very large number of small clients. And the reason we have that broad base and the reason we structure the business in that way is because if any of them do leave, no one's getting made redundant.

The business isn't going to fall over in the morning if any won't. Now, that's a very sort of resilient to all of that. Yeah, that's a really good key point there.

Yeah, because naturally if you end up building a firm that relies on two, three clients and one of them leaves, you're in deep water. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, there's loads, I'm not going to name firms and I'm certainly not going to name individuals, but anyone who knows the IP legal sector will know that there's lots of examples of big, really, really successful seasoned lawyers who leave big firms and take a couple of clients with them and set up their own practice.

But then you've got a very, very narrow base. And if anything happens, if any one of those client relationships breaks down, if any one of those businesses goes under or something like COVID happens or something like Brexit happens and suddenly your whole manufacturing operation moves from the UK to, you know, somewhere in Europe or somewhere in Asia or wherever and suddenly 20-25% of the firm's revenue is gone because that business walked out the door or it could just be the head of legal changed and suddenly they want to appoint another firm because they've some historical connection from law school or university. You know, those are really, really tenuous things that can go away.

And again, you know, because we're talking about culture, when you work in that way where you are so dependent on and so, sort of, you're almost a slave to this one business or this small number of businesses, that's going to impact culture, right? You have to bend over backwards for those people. If they say jump, you're saying how high because you are, it's existential. You are so, so dependent on those people.

You're going to end up working evenings and you're going to end up working weekends and you're going to end up asking your junior lawyers to do the same. And we just never do that here. I would never ask someone to work in the evening.

I would never ask someone to work in the weekend because it's, they're not being paid to do that. You're asking more of them. What you've said there really drives home the culture that you really do have across your firm.

I know, I'm sure the listener to this, most of them are law firm owners, would be interested to know, so how do you incentivise your team members to stay? Well, again, going back to what I said at the very beginning when I cheekily corrected your pronunciation of my name. I'm a huge believer in such transparency, transparency and honesty. You don't always get it in big firms and I didn't really like that.

I like being, I'm a bit of a control freak. I sort of like being in control, so I like to know what's happening. So that's the first thing and one of the first things you have to say to people from as early as the interview or even the advert for the interview.

You have to be clear about what you are and you have to be clear about what you're not. We're not a US firm. We're not a Magic Circle firm.

We cannot compete with those firms on price. So we submit, say to people really, really early. If you're only motivated by money, you know, if you want to be on a six-figure salary really early on in your career, you shouldn't be here because we're not that firm and we're not trying to, you know, we're not trying to compete with those people.

Go and work for Alan O'Shearman, go and work for Clifford Chance, go and work for whoever. But if you want to work for a law firm where you will do intellectual property law every day, day in, day out and if that's something that you find challenging and interesting, this is the place to be. And if you want to work in that area where you're not going to get siloed into, you have to be a contentious lawyer, you have to be a litigator or you have to be a non-contentious lawyer.

You have to work on deals, transactions. You have to work on portfolio management. You're only going to do trademarks, copyright designs.

That's the other sort of advantage that we have is we bring people in and they become really, really good, really well-rounded IP lawyers quite early on because they do everything. Contentious, non-contentious, trademark infringement, passing off, copyright infringement, design rights, trade secrets, confidential information, contracts, licensing, all of it. So that sort of appeals to people.

So you're incentivising them with career progression and the opportunity to grow and learn. Yeah, yeah. And the opportunity to be really, really confident because if you're dealing with new inquiries, maybe 20 of them every week, suddenly you're talking to hundreds of businesses every year.

You're in the room. You're in the Zoom Teams meeting, whatever. You're thinking on your feet.

You become really commercially minded. You become a problem solver. Yeah, wow.

You start to see how the bits of the IP jigsaw fit together. You can start to say, okay, yeah, that's actually a passing off claim. It's a trademark infringement claim, but also there's a copyright issue.

Maybe there's a design rights aspect. There's a contract aspect. Strategically, how are we going to think about, you know, you become really, really good at solving problems rather than thinking in a very siloed way, which often happens, well, either it happens that way when you work in a big firm because you're only thinking in one area, or you don't think about it at all because you're not the partner.

You're not making strategic decisions. The strategic decisions are made above you and somebody passes a document to you and says, do the technical piece of work on this, and you're not really applying your mind to the problem. So I would lump all of that stuff in as sort of one advantage of you're effectively going to be behaving like a partner or a senior lawyer from a very, very early stage at Briffa.

That's one of the ways that we incentivize people. You get that sense of confidence, you get that sense of growth, you get that sense of purpose. You're probably not acting for Coca-Cola or like a big household name, but I've always felt, and I've worked, as I said, I've worked for very big firms, I've worked for some of the biggest companies in the world, and yeah, you do get a bit of a sense of, you get a bit of a buzz by closing a big deal that's, you know, on the front page of a newspaper, fine.

But I actually think you get way more of a sense of purpose by having a founder startup come into you and you help them with their IP, you get their agreement sorted, you see the business grow over a couple of years, and then two or three years later, you see the sign on the side of a bus in London or in a tube station or you see it in a store and you say, oh, actually, I register that trademark. I dealt with that as an off dispute. I know the owner of that company.

He's a mace. Well, maybe he's not a mate, but we're friends on LinkedIn. Yeah.

So you're incentivizing a whole series of things here. I'm hearing, as you said earlier, you don't ask people to work evenings on weekends. No.

There's this great culture of transparency being fully expressed and being welcome to speak your mind, right? Is what I'm getting. Yeah. It's just fabulous and all these things.

And then, of course, purpose to be involved in something that has a greater purpose. It's not all about the money. It's about really serving those ambitious entrepreneurs to achieve what matters to them.

And you're part of those people's future in a major way. Yeah. And again, you can't, you know, loads of those.

The majority of those people aren't going to stay here and you have to be cool with that. They are going to make decisions for their own reasons. And I think this this new generation of lawyers in particular care a lot more about their work life balance.

They they're way less wedded to the traditional idea that you get in there, you put your head down, you work your heart out for eight years and hopefully maybe you become a partner. I don't think this generation of lawyers are wired that way. I do want a sense of purpose.

They do care about I mean, of course, they care about money too, but they think about money in a completely different way to the way we do and to the way, you know, my parents' generation did. So I do think that sense of purpose is important. Having said that, you do also have to think about money because, you know, people think people want mortgages and people, you know, London in particular is an expensive city to live in.

So, of course, people want to think about that. And one of the ways that we sort of try to tie that sense of personal fulfillment and personal work to the money is the way that we pay people. So we commit to paying people at an exact percentage of what they bill.

Oh, really? Yeah, well, another one of the things that I sort of didn't like about the way big firms are structured in terms of pay, although I understood it because at a certain scale you have to do it that way. I remember people sort of saying, oh, you're the class of 2012 or you're the class of 2015 and so you're on this bracket and then you move up to the next thing and you're on this bracket and you move up to the next thing and you're on this bracket. So everyone is sort of on the same wave or pretty much on the same wave until you become quite senior.

Yeah. And then it's all very secret. You know, it depends on where you're going for partnership or what group you're in, what department you're in and people are getting paid.

It wasn't such clear at all how you are getting paid in response to the work that you're doing. So we just sort of say to people, look, we're going to start you on a salary which we think is competitive in terms of what market rates are for a firm of our size and for this sector. And then after your first full year, we're going to look at what you did in that year and we're going to pay you an exact percentage of that based on what you've billed basically, based on what you've performed, based on your performance.

And a percentage of that is salary and a little percentage of it is bonus. And the reason you hold a bit back is because you also want people to do things that aren't just related to billing. We want to look at people's conversion.

We want to look at how well they sell. We want to look at their business development activities. Are they rainmakers? Do they go out there? Do they meet clients? Do they do sort of CPD? Do they go on podcasts like this? Do they get their brand out there and the BRFA brand out there? So you incentivize people in that way to be really good lawyers in terms of, you know, turning leads into clients, turning clients into repeat clients and making money out of, you know, doing good business basically.

And it's meritocratic in that way. So if you feel like you are getting a good chunk, a good cut of what you've actually billed, then I think that sort of feeds into the idea that, yeah, this is a place where I can sort of develop my own practice, have a sense of purpose, become a really good lawyer, a really confident lawyer, making decisions, dealing with clients at a very early stage. And actually my salary can also increase quite quickly depending on how hard I work.

Suddenly people feel like, yeah, this is actually a place where I could see myself building a career. I feel quite empowered now. Now you could definitely still go down the street and work for a bigger firm and maybe get, I don't know, 10 grand more, maybe 20, even 30 grand more.

And people do say that. My response to which is, yeah, absolutely. But it's a different job.

You won't be doing what you'd be doing here. You would be in a department. There would be someone above you making a lot of those decisions.

You will be working evenings, probably. You will be working weekends. And you probably, although I believe lots of the big firms do this now as well, but we give people flexibility in terms of, they've unlimited annual leave, for example.

They can take as much holiday as they want because it's up to them. They're being measured by output, not by input. I don't really care how many days people are here as long as they're performing well.

They can work abroad. So, you know, if you want to go and spend three months in Spain during the summer and work from there, fine. You do you, boo.

Again, I'm measuring your output. I don't really care where you are. Love it.

I absolutely resonate with that. I don't know if you know, but I'm in the process of seeking and finding and buying my first law firm. And exactly that is what I would implement.

It's like I don't care, you know, the overall hours you put in or where you work from, you know. I would say these are your basic targets and anything above that, you know, you get rewarded for. How do you see the difference in incentivizing team members individually, which usually causes them to maybe become a bit siloed and hog work versus a bonus that's firm wide, for instance? I suppose on the individual point, what we do is, as I said, the overall metric is we pay you a percentage of what you've built in the previous year and then within that chunk we divide it down into salary and bonus.

The bit that's held back and the payment of the bit that's held back is dependent on you having done certain other things and I mentioned one of them which is business development and another which is your conversion metric. How good you are at converting leads to clients. Another element of that, particularly for sort of mid-level to senior lawyers, is supervision.

So you have to do X number of collaborations per quarter, say. Which means if you get a nice juicy case in or you get a nice deal in or there's a big portfolio that comes in and there's a lot of work to be done on that, you have to share the work with junior lawyers. So you're incentivized to pass a bit of the work around to take that box to make sure that you're complying with all of your requirements that your bonus gets paid.

And the idea, I guess, is that you inculcate this idea that actually sharing work can be mutually beneficial and particularly for low-level work. So to give you an example, in trademark practice, there are things called office actions which come up all the time. They're fairly routine, they're fairly straightforward, but there is a value to that work and there's a fixed amount of work that has to be done.

If you're a fairly sort of senior lawyer, you probably, and there's 40 office actions on your desk for a large trademark portfolio, you want to be getting on and maybe doing other work. So it's in your interest to train up more junior lawyers on how to deal with office actions, to know what to look for, to know how to instruct your foreign agents, to know how to communicate with the clients about what you need from them and by when. And then you can delegate that work.

You can take a bit of the fee, give a bit of the fee to the junior lawyer, so everyone wins then. You've gotten all of that sort of quite admin-heavy work off your desk. The junior lawyer is learning and earning.

You're earning a bit from the work that they're doing on your client, your matter, but you've got now, you've got more free time now. You can do other stuff. And that's how you sort of ensure that, that's how you ensure that balance across the firm.

Nobody is working late into the night now. You don't have some people who are absolutely run off their feet because they're hogging all this work. And then you've got junior lawyers who've got nothing to do and they're not learning anything.

So you're ensuring that the firm is sort of operating in an optimal way. Everyone is billing, everyone's making money, everyone's learning. And it also, going back to a point you made earlier about sort of not effectively allowing people to hog clients too much.

Now the client has had exposure to three people. Partner supervising, the lead lawyer, and a junior person who's helping out with some work. So if in that example, the senior lawyer left, you could sort of replace the senior lawyer with someone else, but calm the client down by saying supervisor, partner hasn't changed.

I've got visibility on everything. I've, you know, I know where all the, I know I've got the institutional knowledge and also this junior person who is helping out is there to assist with sort of continuity as well. Everyone's chilled now about the fact that there was a change of, there was a change of personnel and that client is less likely to follow the senior lawyer out the door.

I lost the thread of your original question. I think you were asking about can you incentivize people by bonuses across the firm? Was that the idea? Yeah, it was. Yeah.

Have you, well, have you implemented both individual bonus that can tend to cause people to hog work or are you also implementing firm-wide bonus as well to make everybody work as a team? We don't do, we don't do sort of firm-wide bonuses that are linked to work in that sense because our whole idea is that it's supposed to be merit-based. You sort of get back what you put in. So the way that we try to get people to work as teams is the way I've just described.

The other things that we do, it's not directly in answer to your question, but the things that we try to do to build a really good team culture is to have really good socials effectively and to get, you know, to do things with people that remind them that we're actually a sort of a small firm. You know, there's whatever there is, 28 or 9, nearly 30 of us now. We took them to Paris a couple of years ago.

We're going to Lisbon in a couple of weeks. We do a sports day every summer. We do a big, you know, we do four socials a year basically, something big in the spring, summer, Halloween and Christmas.

And I think I've always thought it's really, really important to get people out from behind their desks, whether you're a lawyer, whether you're working in formalities, whether you're working in accounts, whether you're a partner or a paralegal. Getting people in a wheelbarrow race in a park in Islington during the summer is a really good way to break down barriers and remind people that actually we're all human beings. This is all just a job for all of us.

You know, we come to work and I've always found that, you know, if there is any sort of seeds of toxicity or people are sort of grumbling about something, you can flush all that out by breaking down barriers, having good sorts of socials. So we put a lot of money and a lot of time into ensuring that we do that stuff quite well. And it goes back to what we started our conversation about the authenticity point.

A very nice, glossy website will sort of indicate that there's a really good culture and a really good social culture at a place and actually the reality is that there isn't that good culture. People actually don't go to those events because they're too busy. And at the end of the day, people want you to work rather than participating in those events, whereas we don't do that here.

On Halloween, when we're doing our pumpkin carving here in the office, I'll be going around flashing lights on and off telling people to stop working because this is actually important too. So yeah, I appreciate it's not quite the point you're driving at, but I would say investment in that kind of stuff is actually an important part of holding people together and building a good team culture. Yeah, brilliant.

Absolutely fantastic. I've gained so many great insights from speaking to you today. I'm sure the listener has as well.

What do you think is the biggest challenge that most law firm owners face that causes them to neglect building a culture? Well, where do you start? Well, I suppose in the last year to 18 months, it feels like people have been quite gloomy. You know, a lot of people are quite unhappy about what's happened since the government changed. Increase in employers and I, people are sort of quite worried about costs.

That impacts everything. It impacts how much it costs to run a business and how much you're able to pay people. That puts downward pressure on salaries.

So yeah, I guess the cost has a simple sort of financial aspect to it. It's difficult for people to do that. I guess potentially the fact that the, well, sorry, the other point I was going to make about why people are potentially a bit gloomy is AI is posing this existential risk.

I think people are genuinely worried about, you know, should they be investing in AI? Should they be waiting? Should they be using it? Are they going to get left behind? And it's all so expensive now because you're at the early stage and all this technology isn't tested. People don't know how to use it. I think that's potentially impacting the way that people are making decisions.

Yeah. Which is potentially inhibiting people's ability to invest in culture. Another aspect that I think probably has impacted culture is the way that we've shifted to working remotely.

Yeah. Post COVID, so in the last five years. Yeah.

It used to be that we were all in the same place for 40 hours every week. And if you wanted to do, if you wanted to build a culture around an office, it was relatively easy to do that because you knew where everyone was. If you've tried to lean into hybrid working as part of building a good culture and as part of a good work-life balance.

Which is what, which is what you've done at your firm, right? Which is what we've done and I would say there are huge positives to that. It's certainly better for people with families because it's, you're in more control of your working hours if you want to balance your childcare responsibilities with your husband, wife, partner. Like I've said, if you need to come in a bit later to do drop-off, if you need to leave a bit or to do, you know, pick-up, drop-off, whatever you can sort of potentially make that work with your more flexible working hours.

But there is a downside to that. You know, being in the same physical space as people isn't the same as having people connected through Zoom or through Teams. So your culture can, you know, it could potentially impact your culture and maybe people say, well there isn't the same justification for investing in cultural or things that lead to a good culture in the office if everyone isn't here all the time to benefit from it.

That may be one reason why people don't do that. We try to counteract that by saying that there's certain things that we want people to be in the office for all the time. So we do a monthly CPD session, for example, on the first Wednesday of every month that everyone has to be here in person and we go for lunch after that.

We take everyone out and we buy them lunch and it's just an opportunity where once a month we're all together. Yeah. We've gotten together, we've talked about a few cases, we're keeping ourselves up to date on IP law and there's a bit of a social side to it.

Obviously, all of the socials are in person. And then you've also got those four big social events a year as well. And the four biggies, yeah.

So, yeah, it's a good question. Do you not have like a weekly call where the whole firm dials in once a week? No, we used to do that a few, we used to do that quite a few years ago and we did away with it mainly because it sort of turned into a talking shop. We didn't feel it was addressing the need.

You know, we wanted it to be a way where everybody could make everyone else aware of what they were working on. It was an opportunity to sort of get the word out. It was an opportunity for people to learn, to ask questions.

But what we found was the same people were talking all the time and the same people were silent all the time. And even if you sort of, you know, pass the talking stick around, people who are reluctant to talk in that environment will not say much or will feel that they're forced to speak. And then some people will just not give the talking stick up and why you don't want to sort of talk the whole time.

So what we do instead now is we have one-to-ones. Everyone has sort of a half an hour a month where they sit down with their supervising partner and shoot the breeze, basically. That's, that's one of my core strategies that I talk about in my book Delegate Now to Supercharge Your Profits is to have a weekly one-on-one.

So everybody across the firm has every week a one-on-one with somebody about their targets, what they're doing, what they're struggling with. And that can vary from anywhere between 15 minutes and an hour depending on, you know, how much support the individual needs. Yeah, I mean if you're going to do it weekly, an hour is a lot.

Particularly if you're going to do it with multiple people. We do, we do about 30 minutes and we do it monthly. But also, because this is, we're a relatively small firm, you know, I don't really close my doors closed today because I'm on Zoom, but most of the days the door is open, they just walk in.

And I try to make myself as available as possible if they want to ask anything. Okay, yeah. That hour, that person... But that's because you've got a physical base, right? That people can walk into.

You're not talking about they just dial in on Zoom or Teams anytime. Yeah, well, some of them, yeah. I mean, I try, I don't think it's, I don't think it's a good idea to make yourself completely accessible because you get nothing done and I'm sure your coaching managers, you talk to people about conserving time.

But equally, you know, I don't like the idea of partners being so inaccessible that junior lawyers almost feel like they're really afraid to knock at the door or they're afraid to Teams you. So, you know, I think we've, you know, anyone who's worked with me for a while sort of know what I'm like and know how I like to be communicated with. And I think if you're, if you have a reasonably good instinct at being respectful of other people's time and space, you'll get it.

Like if it's important and you need to just dial me on Teams, maybe send me a message first if you think that I might be busy. But yeah, do call, you know, do feel like, don't feel like you have to suffer in silence. Do, you know, jump in if you need to.

But that protected time, that sort of half an hour a month where you do sit down, it's just the two of you and the door is closed, that's really important because for people who are maybe more introverted or less likely to just bring up an issue by walking in to the room, you need to give them that space. Yeah, and also, yeah, I was just going to say as well, stand by that, yeah. There's also sometimes an issue that you see recurring throughout the month.

You know, you hear people on the phone and the way they're articulating something and they're like, oh, that's not quite right and you see things going back on emails. It's not always feasible and frankly, it's not always appropriate to go and start to confront that person in the middle of an open office space and say, oh, you know, the way you said that wasn't quite right or to be sending people emails, even if they're sort of constructive and come across as quite critical, particularly if it's a new person and they're getting loads of emails from you saying, oh, the way you wrote that wasn't quite right, the way you said that wasn't quite right. Whereas if you just take it all in and say, okay, this new person, you know, they're here this three or four months, there's a couple of things that they want to pick up with them.

You can think about what you want to say and in that room, you can give them some really good feedback that will really get in because you can give them specific examples, but they're in a room, they're in a safe space, they don't feel like they've been confronted in an open office space where you've said something in front of other people. And similarly, if you put it in writing, it doesn't always land right. Yeah.

Because communication by email doesn't always work and context and tone matters. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Brilliant.

Absolutely. I could talk to you forever. Absolutely.

What you've built is inspiring and you know, you've now got really good foundations of culture that's just going to keep growing. You know, the more people join, they're going to get with the great culture program going forwards. Yeah, hopefully.

I see a huge future for you and your firm and what you're building. It's very inspiring. Yeah.

Cool. Well, fingers crossed. We'll carry on.

Keep calm and carry on. Well, Éamonn, it's great to have you here. Thanks so much.

And yeah, I look forward to staying in touch and catching up in the future. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Dan.

Cheers. Bye. Thank you for listening to the Law Firm Owners Podcast with me, your host, Dan Warburton.

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