Consistent Values Persistent Success
This article first appeared in the Firm Magazine.
There are few who would maintain that legal problems in 2009 are essentially the same as they were in 1845. Phyllis Stephen meets Bird Semple’s Frank Fletcher, whose philosophical approach builds on slow burning, multi-generational success.
When you walk into the Bird Semple office on the corner of Blythswood Square you are met rather incongruously by a short pair of disembodied, yet unmistakably male legs with an “Oor Wullie” bucket strategically placed over the top third to save the blushes of more sensitive clients. The office is “well-appointed” in estate agent speak, and has the same air as Frank himself, reassuringly calm and professional, but with a sense of humour just simmering along under the surface.
Now a solicitor of some 30 years standing, he is an accredited specialist in Trust matters and is clearly someone who would consider any problems carefully before giving you his view. He says quite honestly that being a specialist is not something he gives much thought to any more, but it is definitely something which the clients take for granted.
Quiet and unassuming, but utterly comfortable in his own skin, Frank Fletcher is someone who is doing exactly what he set out to do when applying for his first position as an apprentice. He wanted an intellectual challenge whilst being able to help people at the same time.
A great deal of his own and his firm’s work comes from referrals, something which all management experts tell you is the best way to get new business.
“I would hope that new clients will come to me because of what they have heard from other clients or professional advisers, that I will be committed to giving 110% attention, and that I am 110% trustworthy and honest and will go the extra mile,” he says.
“We are not in the business of getting passing trade. What we want to do is create a long-standing relationship. Clients cannot really judge whether you are any good or not at the outset. They take your professional expertise for granted, but we work quite hard at keeping ourselves up to speed and two of us here are accredited specialists.”
The boutique firm now has five partners all concentrating on their own portfolio of work, but Fletcher has, as well as being the major fee-earner, the responsibilities of Managing Partner and Staff Partner. Asked why he should be the one who would take on the managing partner role he is quite candid and says that he is the one with “heli-vision” that he is able to see the big picture and that as he had already been head of the private client department previously, his other two partners were accustomed to that set-up, and happy for it to continue.
There are probably now all too few people who will be with one firm “man and boy” but the sense of tradition which it bestows is not lost on Fletcher. His influence permeates the firm from top to bottom, and honesty, integrity and confidentiality are all words used in the firm’s newsletter to clients as well as by Frank himself.
He realised long ago that it is essential to maintain a strong relationship with professional advisers and has managed to combine that with one of his favourite pastimes, salmon fishing. He says “We discovered there was a significant gap in the market for lawyers who understood trusts, and because of the need for this in pension and life insurance work that opened up a gap in the market for us. IFA contacts are a source of that work and I found that one of my IFA colleagues liked to fish as much as me. There is nothing quite as therapeutic as standing up to your waist in the middle of the Tay! We had to make it a kind of business development exercise so that we would make time to do it, and we invite clients along too.”
He rejects the notion that he is a “man of business” as the traditional idea of a solicitor goes, arguing that it is impossible to be that these days as the law has become too complicated.
He takes great pride in the fact that some of the staff have been with the firm for a good number of years, including his former PA who worked with him for 25 years. “The business is ultimately about people. I would not want to work in a firm which did not have good relations with its staff, particularly with the pressures nowadays.” The size of the firm means that everyone in the Blythswood Square office know each other by name, something which got lost in some of the larger versions of the firm. “It is perhaps aspirational to call it a bit of a family, but there are people on our staff who have been here since they left school.”
It hasn’t always been the bright lights of the big city for Fletcher. When he had only been a qualified solicitor for about four months Fletcher was sent to Stornoway to man the office there, and in January 1979 he became the firm’s “overseas” partner. Coming back from Lewis to the mainland was sometimes made a little difficult owing to over-zealous security at the airport, who questioned him as he stepped through with his two Stornoway black puddings under his arm both beautifully wrapped in brown paper and string by the island butcher. Once unknown but now a delicacy served in the best restaurants, Frank was bringing the puddings back for the two islanders who had migrated in the other direction to work in the Glasgow office. One small regret however is that his knowledge of Gaelic is minimal. “I never acquired any Gaelic while I was there. I have no talent for languages although I am married to a language teacher. I passed Higher Latin but languages have never been a strongpoint.”
He credits his training in client confidentiality and managing people to this part of his career. He recalls that two of the staff in the Stornoway office were related as third cousins, (“a relationship which you or I would have difficulty in working out!”) and that it was best to be cautious when dealing with people there, who might appear at first sight to be a wee crofter but who would “inevitably turn out to be a master mariner who had been three times round the world before you were a glimmer in your father’s eye and very well educated!”
He is engagingly realistic about the responsibilities which management entails however, and refers to the management of a legal partnership in particular as a bit like “herding cats”…. He thinks that there is really no need for solicitors’ firms generally, and certainly not his firm in particular, to have professional managers and that solicitors are just as able to manage themselves now as they have done for generations. He says “Lawyers think themselves to be intelligent people and don’t like even to be managed by their fellow partners and so where there are office managers and the like there are always differences between lawyers and non-lawyers. There are benefits however, in certain areas, particularly in the areas of counting – most lawyers can’t count!”
Fletcher’s experience of the formal big firm set-up enabled him to walk away from that situation taking the best of it with him to the new firm. He claims that if he has any management style at all it is “management by experience”. The role of managing partner has a job description which forms a part of the Partnership Agreement.
Time off is something which he recognises is difficult to achieve even in a firm replete with other partners, assistants and associates and he admits “It is a challenge to find spare time.” Having recently been on holiday himself he describes a solicitor who goes on holiday as someone who is attempting to jump from a moving train and remarks that the train goes faster than ever before with advances in technology.
Fletcher believes his clients have the same legal problems as they might have had in 1845 when the original firm of Bird Son & Semple opened its doors, it is simply the way that the problem is dealt with which has altered. All of the life events such as births and deaths, marriage and divorce which engender attention from the family lawyer are the same as they have been for generations. “The Asset Protection partner of today is the old Trust & Executry solicitor of yesterday.
The property department may be a little quieter but the rest of the firm dealing with asset protection is having a very good year. “Three-quarters of the firm’s work is asset protection which is hardly touched by this downturn at all, but as far as the Property side is concerned we have taken steps to ensure that we have contained costs but also retained people.”
As for the future, he mentions the recent backing from the Law Society of alternative business structures and the proposed re-emergence of multi-disciplinary parternships including the possibility of external funding in solicitors’ firms, and the fact that these new arrangements might throw up the opportunity of acquiring another private client business of similar size. It is not something he would run away from and one gets the feeling that he would relish the challenge of it. “The key is the quality of the people. There are other people whose work you have come across and you respect. We have had successes in attracting people to our firm in this way. Good people attract good work.”
Posted by Sharon Clift on Feb 11, 2010
