‘Most of our clients are entities – be they corporations or partnerships – but these client relationships are, above all, a series of relationships with individuals. You may be acting for one of the biggest global corporations, but ultimately, it’s all about building trust with individuals,’ explains Slaughter and May managing partner David Johnson.
When it comes to the priorities for clients when choosing a law firm, the quality of the individuals who work there is of course high up the list. But while partners can reel off their monthly billings, quality isn’t always an easy metric to quantify.
However, data collected during Legal 500 research offers direct insight into what clients think about the lawyers they use.
Every year, the research team collects thousands of scores from client referees on a range of client service metrics – and for the UK’s biggest law firms, Slaughter and May gets the top score for partner quality.
Other firms that rank highly on this metric include Withers, Travers Smith, A&O Shearman, and Linklaters, while among the 50 largest law firms in the world, Weil, Gotshal & Manges comes out top, with Simpson Thacher, Skadden, King & Spalding and Sidley following.
Marks of quality
So what makes a high quality law firm partner? For Johnson – who took over as Slaughters’ second-ever managing partner in August last year – the key qualities of a good partner can be summed up in three points.
As he summarises: ‘Firstly, you want to project the kind of confidence that comes from experience. That air of calm when everybody else is panicking is absolutely key.’
‘Secondly, you need to have absolutely excellent technical ability (this is taken for granted) and be able to demonstrate commercial awareness. You can be the best technical lawyer in the world, but if you can’t apply that to a commercial setting, you are of very limited value, in my view.’
‘Finally, you need to be able to demonstrate leadership – that you can lead a team, and that you can get your team to deliver to the same standard as you.’
‘If everything works out well, you get to the point where the client thinks, “This is a person I want next to me at the really difficult moments in my professional life.”‘
Among some of the specific Legal 500 practice areas in which Slaughters receives the highest scores for partner quality are power, planning and commercial contracts, while the firm’s partners are also among the top scorers for premium M&A, bank lending and corporate crime.
The client view
One GC at a FTSE 100 company describes Slaughters and ‘a proper bet-the-company firm’, saying: ‘I will never be criticised for appointing Slaughters – the quality of the lawyers there is so good.’
Paul Stebbings, Europe GC at Tate & Lyle Sugars, believes that for in-house counsel, relationships with quality partners are crucial. ‘It isn’t necessarily the law firm – it’s the lawyer within that. If partners cross to another firm and you’ve got a good relationship, then you’d think about going with them.’
Stebbings explains why he sticks with those established relationships: ‘They’re not necessarily the cheapest, but they offer value for money because they’re giving you a more holistic service.’
Sara Mackie, GC at data analytics company JMAN Group and the former group GC at French Connection, defines quality client partners as those who invest in important relationships from the get-go. ‘Good partners will realise early on the strategic value of that instruction and will stay across it,’ she says.
‘I had an example where a partner could just have delegated the work to a more junior member of the team, but they were very involved and came to in-person meetings to talk through what we wanted to achieve,’ she recalls. ‘They were there all the way through the project – they put a lot of investment behind that relationship.’
Johnson agrees that partners need to show that they are all in. ‘You have to make every client feel that they are the sole focus of your attention and care. Rationally, we all know that’s not feasible, because managing multiple clients is a practical necessity, but that’s how a client wants to feel, and I think that’s fair.’
