Sarah Walker-Smith tells Richard Brent why 2020 is the right year to transform both strategy and structure at Shakespeare Martineau

If you started a law firm from scratch today, which processes and other aspects of the organisation as it stands would you keep and which would you ditch? It’s a question Briefing has posed in our research and at events several times over the last 10 years – a nod to the challenge that long legacy can often present to useful change – and it surely seems one for 2020.

It has certainly been on the mind of Sarah Walker-Smith, who is less than two years into her role as the CEO of Shakespeare Martineau. In the summer of 2019, her board and a newly appointed shadow board comprising 12 different voices at the firm were both locked away for a set of workshops – “in a forest, literally,” she says – and out came perspectives on what a new firm strategy ought to look like.

Walker-Smith had a plan before, but it needed sense-checking. And one outcome of this consultation is that Shakespeare Martineau is now a group – a collection of individual LLPs under one umbrella, each of which will have more autonomy over how they go to market and manage business for themselves.

She explains: “We know that we need to be significantly bigger to fulfil the potential of everyone who works at the firm – but one rather strange thing about the way the legal sector tends to grow is the acquisition of firms only to annihilate them. You buy a great brand, with great ideas, but because you’re bigger, your ideas are inflicted on them. It’s our way or the highway. We want to reverse that.”

In what is dubbed the ‘House of Brands’ strategy, new names are now immediately being sought out that find this prospect appealing, potentially in a niche area or a particular part of the country. Under the umbrella, they’ll be joining the likes of Lime Solicitors (personal injury and clinical negligence), Corclaim (debt and loss recovery) and the town planning consultancy Marrons Planning. The latter, as an example, already “sits very neatly alongside the firm’s legal services as its own brand,” Walker-Smith says. “But we need to liberate it.”

At the same time, she highlights, many legal businesses may “genuinely sadly” be considering their options in the climate brought on by Covid-19. “They could be struggling with insurance, or keeping up with compliance, and we are able to help them to continue doing what they love to do, but without telling them how to do it.”

There will be economies of scale through shared services, such as IT, she explains, and additional investment options are also being considered: “How far and how fast will depend on how much we need.”

This article was taken from ‘Brand promises’ in Briefing November/December 2020 – Alert to change. Read the full publication here.