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Captains of industry take the helm
Senior management positions in law firms have traditionally been the domain of partners. However a number of firms, both in Australia and overseas, are taking a different tack by appointing non lawyers with diverse business backgrounds to these positions.
Arguably one of the most high profile of these appointments was Minter Ellison’s recruitment of Guy Templeton as its chief executive in February 2005. Originally from an engineering background, Templeton moved to take on Minters’ top management position from PA Consulting Group, where he was a global managing partner, chairman of Asia Pacific Regional Development and the Australia country head.
This strategy has also been taken up by top-tier firms in New Zealand: Russell McVeagh’s chief executive officer (CEO) Gary McDiarmid and Chapman Tripp’s chief executive Alastair Carruthers both come from non-legal business backgrounds.
A recent example in Australia was Lander & Rogers’ appointment of Grant Scott-Hayward as the firm’s chief operating officer (COO), which was a newly created position for the firm.
Though a non lawyer, Scott-Hayward is no stranger to professional services organisations. His previous experience includes heading up Beaton Consulting’s Beacon research, which is the world’s largest study of clients of professional services firms. He also has significant management experience, including a unique role as CEO and advisor to the King of the Royal Bafokeng Nation in South Africa, as well as holding management positions in other top and mid tier professional services firms.
Scott-Hayward believes that firms hiring non lawyers are doing so in an effort to operate more commercially in an increasingly sophisticated legal market.
“My perception is that the firms that are doing it are the more progressive firms,” he said. “Clearly it’s a competitive market and, from my experience at Beaton, there’s no doubt that firms are becoming a lot more sophisticated in how they compete. As a result, they’re looking for different ways of gaining a competitive advantage and being able to better deliver to clients, and run their operations and their businesses in a more efficient and effective way.”
The recruitment of Scott-Hayward follows Sydney firm Cutler Hughes & Harris’ appointment of marketing guru Robin Parkes this year. Like Scott-Hayward, Parkes took on the role of COO, again a newly created position for the firm. Parkes, who is the former general manager of OgilvyAction – the brand activation arm of the Ogilvy Group – said at the time of her appointment that she believed the firm was taking a “very bold step” in appointing a non lawyer to the position.
Now four months into the position, Parkes believes that her ability to see things with a fresh perspective has been of great benefit to the firm.
“I believe hiring someone with commercial experience rather than law experience brings a new dimension to the management of a firm. I bring an outsider’s view – a different approach and a different way of doing things. My background has been diverse enough to give me the necessary experience whilst having the fresh eyes to review everything,” she said.
“I have deliberately not done too much research and learning around law firms, as I want to continue to bring fresh ideas and a fresh approach to it. I think that having some naivety around how things are traditionally done means I will question why we do things in a certain way and be less tenacious in changing things.”
Parkes’ view is shared by Scott-Hayward: “I think [firms who appoint non lawyers] recognise the value of people who are trained in a different way and have different expertise,” he said. “They bring that different expertise to the table and they have a different perspective into the firm, and the firm is seeking to gain from that.”
However while it is paying off for some firms, appointing non lawyers to senior management positions is not a strategy that will suit all firms, warns Mark Dean, the managing director of executive recruitment consultancy Dean & Ling.
“There’s no off-the-shelf solution which suits all firms, so you would need to individually assess the requirements of the firm before you [appoint] a non lawyer to a management position,” he said.
He also believes that the skill set and experience a firm should be looking for in a non lawyer senior manager will depend greatly on the firm’s own existing strengths and weaknesses.
“For instance, a COO or CEO with strong financial skills will be less important for a firm with a sophisticated financial function. In those instances, people with marketing backgrounds may be more appropriate,” he said.
Like Dean, Scott-Hayward believes that matching a person’s skill set and personality to the particular firm is of primary importance. “These sorts of changes are fundamental and can have an impact on the way the firm operates. Often it can have an influence on the culture,” he said.
“The key is finding the right individual to fit the firm – at the end of the day that’s possibly the biggest thing. The firm needs to make sure that they find the right person who will fit in with the firm and take it to the next level in its life.”
In general, Dean believes that non lawyer senior managers are more appropriate in small to medium-sized firms which have less sophisticated support service departments such as human resources, marketing, finance and business development. Conversely, large firms more commonly prefer to stick with partners for these positions.
“In a small to medium-sized business you will find that CEOs are often also the human resources leader, the finance leaders and very strong marketers. They need to have very strong technical training across a range of different disciplines,” he said.
“As business get larger, the need for more generalised business leadership becomes greater, because you often have very highly sophisticated management structures and leaders in place for all the shared services functions. Then you need someone who can interpret all the data and lead the business at that higher level. For those reasons, it’s more likely that in larger firms you will find lawyers in those top jobs.”
However as Minter Ellison aptly demonstrates, there’s no hard and fast rule. “You could say it’s certainly more prevalent in small to medium-sized firms, [but] you would still have to look at the firm and its opportunities and differentiators in order to assess whether it is appropriate for a big firm to go there,” Dean said.
15-May-2008
Related Tags
Robin Parkes , COO , non lawyer , Grant Scott-Hayward
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