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Podchaser Episode nine - Joy Kingsley
Regarded as a legal powerhouse of the north west, Joy Kingsley has an incredible track record as a Managing Partner. Under her leadership both Pannone and latterly JMW Solicitors experienced growth of more than £100 million. In this episode of the Your Law Firm Success podcast Joy explains how she used strategic hiring and recruitment as key drivers for success.
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So today’s episode of the your Law Firm success podcast is with Joy Kingsley who’s recently retired Senior Management of JMW which is a firm down in Manchester and London in two successive practices Joy took both of these firms from turnovers of between 5 and 10 million to over 50 and 75 million so cumulatively she grew the firms by 100 million and as usual and what I’ve been finding today she’s very self a facing very understated about it today what we cover in particular is the use of strategic hiring to grow your Law Firm okay so Joy thank you very much for joining me thank you for giving me your time to chat with me on the Your Law Firm success podcast perhaps we could start with you introducing yourself and providing a bit of a bit of background on your career or your illustrious career to date yes Joy Kingsley and at the present time I’m a consultant at JMW having been the senior partner there for 13 years and before that I only worked for one other law firm where I was a trainee and I was also the managing partner and then the senior partner that was a firm called Pannone and in that time both firms grew from being smallish Private Client firms with turnovers of 5 million and 10 million respectively to large firms with 700 people working in them and turnovers of 50 and 70 million respectively so and they were full-service law firms so that’s my background okay so you’ve basically taken or been either at the helm or close to the Helm of two firms where you’ve gone from 5 or 10 million to 50 and 75 million so no flash in the pan yes no but the people say that the second one must have been easy because I’d done it the first what the first one was similar they were similar firms they were at similar stages and so therefore wasn’t really that hard the second time sort of thing and is that true no of course not it they were different firms and different positives and different problems so I would you know neither is easy and obviously it’s a bit of a roller coaster on the way but I enjoyed my career I enjoyed what went on at both firms and in in both cases started from you know I wouldn’t want to call it a low but a small firm and small amount of income to becoming a larger firm with larger amount of income and profit so luckily although there were ups and downs along the way ended well in both cases it’s tremendous achievement on both accounts then when you combine it ends up being growth of probably 100 million you know across the pair of them 100 well I don’t know what each one started with or 110 million the question that I quite often start with asking you this a podcast about your Law Firm success I know JMW is involved with a lot of smaller law firms across the country as well in the law share Network what would be your definition of law success well firstly you want to have a firm that you’re proud of you want to have a firm that the people that work in it really enjoy that they don’t leave and that people behave decently towards each other and of course that very good legal work is carried out and the clients are happy with the results but also that you are financially successful so that you can attract talent and you can grow the firm into profitable growth because without profits you wouldn’t be able to invest in new people and new ideas and I think we’ve always wanted to do things a bit differently here and on both occasions we needed to produce more money putting it bluntly in order that we could invest in everything that we wanted to so that to me is Law Firm success you mentioned there about attracting the right type of people when we discussed what we were going to talk about you talk specifically around strategic hiring as a key driver for Success you know what and what we’re trying to do in each episode of the your law firm success podcast is look at Key levers or that or drivers that those at the helm of the firm pool in order to deliver success and when we spoke you talk you talked quite a lot about strategic hiring so I was wondering if we could maybe cover that in a bit more detail starting off with the thinking or the strategy behind that please so if you decide that where you’re going to go with your Law Firm is a full-service law firm then obviously you are going to need to hire people with expertise across the board gone are the days of very long ago when people were generalists and did all sorts of types of law now people concentrate on one type generally and you need to have good people and ideally those people will either have clients or will attract clients as they become more proficient and more experienced and so you need to have a good way of attracting people to your firm if that’s where you’re going to go with all these things there’s never one answer there’s never one sort of law firm and one way of doing anything for us a combination of interesting Business Development ideas coupled with recruitment as you say meant that we grew the firm in that way and we made sure that we did it profitably and it wasn’t always that we could say well we think we’d like a such and such Department today so we’ll go out and find the people to put in it it’s never quite like that people approach you learn that you need to have good relationships with both recruiters but also know a lot of people in your network that may suggest people and then you have to be able to persuade the candidate that they want to come and work for you because you know very good lawyers who also have business development skills and clients are wanted by a lot of firms so you have to know how you’re going to persuade them that they are for you as it were and what have you found have been the most important ways in which you can persuade them is it money is it culture is it location or combination of factors it is a combination of factors but money is definitely one of them people like to say that money isn’t the main driver and it’s perfectly correct that if you meet somebody and they don’t share the belief that you’re putting forward um and they don’t think that they’re going to be a fit for your firm whether the money is right or not they’re not going to join you but I realised when I first got to JMW that to attract the right sort of people who we wanted to work for us we were going to have to become more financially successful because we were wanting to grow a commercial side having already A Private Client side and good people were already earning good money so they’re not going to join you for less money so you need to build up the firm gradually and obviously the people that join you are going to want to be paid what’s fair for the job what I wouldn’t ever advise people to do would be just to enter a bidding war and it becomes more about who’s won the race and getting somebody that is very very money-driven because you will have your that may not be as good as other years and you don’t want to be worrying constantly that somebody may leave if they earn a bit less one year than another type of thing so I think that money is important but culture is important expectations of these days what the working week is going to look like is important people’s colleagues teams managers all of those add in to being a a good place of people to work and certainly you want to have some excitement something that makes people want to get up in the morning otherwise it could all be very dry but all firms are different and there were firms that were much further along a journey than we were in both of the firms that I work for and therefore we’ve probably had to do more of finding new clients and finding new people and some others but I think recruitments become a very big thing in most law firms now particularly larger ones whether they need to recruit people who have particular expertise who will attract clients because they are so good at what they do or whether they need to attract people who have clients and then they need to attract people who can do the work because obviously if people are successful within a firm they’re going to need more people to do the sorts of work that they do it’s interesting to think about that particularly at the start because I imagine in you know I’d like to understand a bit more about that around Panonne and the attitude to towards risk which is something we’ve spoken about in previous episodes quite a lot because I imagine the considerations around beginning to grow through strategic hiring can have some rolling their eyes back thinking oh no this is going to be so expensive yeah I mean obviously my more recent experience is JMW but at Panonne, Panonne were probably a bit further along the full-service Journey as it were when I took over as managing partner but I took over at managing partner at a very difficult time for the firm in the early 90s in a bad recession that was happening then the firm wasn’t doing particularly well and so I helped guide The Firm to a much better place than it had been in and because of that Partners I think were trusting and therefore if I said I think this will work let’s give it a try and it did then you know they supported my ideas and then when I moved to JMW it was much the same it slightly different in that they were very happy being the firm they were being and mainly doing personal injury and clinical negligence work but the then managing partner Bill Jones of JMW he wanted to grow The Firm more and thought somebody else and as it turned out me would help him do that and he was getting near retirement anyway and so again I think actually the partners here were a bit mistrustful of recruitment because they’d had one or two bad experiences but when I talked to them about it they were willing to give it a go as it were and as it started to work around the firm and it grew the income and the profit and everything we wanted it to do then again they were supportive of it and when we decided four and a half years ago to open an office in London and whereas a lot of firms will just get a serviced office put a few people in it and hope to grow from there we decided to do it the same way that we’d done Manchester and find good people with clients and grow the London office in that way and that of itself has been successful and that went from nought pounds to 23 million over what’s coming up for a five year period so that that’s grown quickly as well but obviously with an eye on profit as well as on income but it’s something that’s worked for us and is continuing to work there’s a new management at JMW now I retired other than as a consultant in April and the firm is now run by people I knew very well in the practice and the transition has been successful and was over really two or three years I first said in 2019 when I would expect to leave the practice and we’ve worked to that time but much of the way that it worked then is the way that it works now as well obviously they’re going to do new and different things we’re not all carbon copies of each other but finding good recruits and putting them into the firm and making sure that they are happy there and want to stay there is something that that that they’re still doing here now and I think will continue thinking about your move from Panonne to JMW it sounds as if you were part of the same process to a certain extent that you then employ for strategic hiring for JMW bringing others in how did you find in your experience of that or what was what was the Catalyst for your move given you talked about stuff like culture you know I don’t I’m obviously not prying on exact details but it must have been quite interesting being at the other side of that yeah I mean it’s one of those things I didn’t think I’d necessarily ever leave Panonne whereas a lot of people particularly now have worked as a number of different firms I’d only ever worked at one it had had different names but there came a time I’d moved on to being senior partner there was a new managing partner the managing partner changed again at Panonne within a short period of time and I just thought you know I’ve got another job another growth in me I mean by that time the firm had it 700 people it had its London office Etc and it all happened quite quickly I just decided that I’d have a look and see what was out there but I it was again in a recession the banking crisis I moved in 2010 and I thought you know would somebody really in another firm put trust in someone that did management didn’t do any fee earning and obviously it would be expensive as a hire so I just thought I’d have a look what was out there and within a month I had three job offers in senior management positions and I took the JMW one because it was a similar challenge I like the people they I you know Central Manchester suited me which is obviously where they were and even though there was a financial crisis because at the time they were only doing Private Client work largely there was a you know a small amount of other work that hadn’t really been hit in the recession that everybody most other firms had been hit by and so it seemed a good choice and the partners were Keen to make changes grow The Firm Etc and so that’s why I moved there okay so that’s interesting it sounds like it was a combination of The Challenge which you were you were wanting the people who you’d already met opportunity location and I imagine you know the money was probably similar was in there but not as the overriding factor and so sorry yeah I mean money having said that it is a bit of a driver for most people I wouldn’t have gone for less money you know that wouldn’t have thought that I was being valued in the correct way but equally you know it wasn’t that you know as I said it was a recession at the time so the amounts of money were similar and therefore it wasn’t really an issue they realised that I would want to come for about the same amount of money I’d been used to earning and if things went well we would all earn more and that’s what happened so it is a lot more profitable now as a firm than when I joined it and therefore everybody’s earned more than we were doing in 2010 brilliant and for for firms anyone listening who’s considering oh maybe strategic hiring lateral hiring is the way for me to grow my firm what do you think are the key considerations well you have to be good at decision making with recruits you need to get it right in my opinion about 80% of the time you’re not going to get it right 100% of the time but it can be very costly if you hard the wrong people in all sorts of ways it can be costly in terms of recruitment fees but also in having got the wrong person in and then how that person leaves you and then finding other people to do the work etc etc obviously I had a lot of recruitment experience at Panonne already and it was an area that I was interested in and seemed to be one that I was good at and therefore there weren’t more than 20% of people that didn’t turn out to be the right people for the firm and that can be culture or it can be that candidates you know lawyer candidates pretty clever people they may hide certain aspects of their personality or or some people are quite prepared to say yes I’ve got loads of clients I want to earn a very large amount of money but I will bring in this amount of money and no matter how much due diligence you do sometimes they don’t like they’ve told you things that weren’t true so you have to make sure that most of the hairs are right ones and that you are able to persuade people in the right way that you’ve got your partners behind you and that they are Keen to join in the process too and they will meet the people and tell them everything that’s good about the team or the department or the firm and I think that you start gradually I mean you don’t go out one day and say send me to a recruitment AG agent send me everybody you’ve got in your pocket you know you will want to see how you do with one or two or three and go from there but I think it’s not revolutionary people have been strategically hiring people for a while I think smaller firms sometimes don’t want to do it because they are worried about how it may impact if they may be working with smaller margins and if they pick the wrong person so they prefer to keep the firm as it is but standing still is never an option because your staff want pay Rises every year so you have the same CL you have the same clients billing the same amount of money without a great hike in fees you aren’t going to be able to give pay Rises to your staff so you need to be building the firm to be more profitable so that the staff can be treated well and they won’t want to go somewhere else who’ll maybe pay them more on the basis that you’ve been doing this for some time what do you think are the most important Lessons Learned both positive and negative from the Strategic hiring point of view but overall in your career as well from a strategic hiring point of view the positives are that it does work if you get it right so and it is a way to build a practice which hasn’t started with a load of the sorts of clients that you now want to act for so it’s a way of getting in new work new people building being more profitable Etc so that’s you know the big positive of it the negative is if you have to manage out somebody that doesn’t turn out to be right that is always distracting it wastes time it can affect morale so you know it’s something to be done with care as it were in general it’s hard to say how you know people what the positive is of growth or what the positive is of a successful Law Firm other than that if things go wrong so when we were hit by the pandemic we didn’t need to panic because we were in a strong position financially and even if things were affected for a year or a number of years we could make the firm still work we weren’t going to be in danger and we were you know I’d worked my way through three recessions previously so I didn’t really have doubts about what we needed to do and you need to do things quickly you can’t sit there hoping everything is going to be all right when everybody’s been sent home some work types have dropped through the floor you have to manage through the process and do it quickly so that you’re ahead of other people so in going to our bank and telling them what we thought the position might be and using the government’s Furlow scheme for example we were very quick to do that and then we were quick to come out of it again afterwards when things actually went better than we’d expected so I think you’re always looking for positives but also turning challenges into positives really and you don’t look for negatives but there will be some and there may be small negatives every day and if you have a good team around you so that you’re not trying to do absolutely everything yourself and you trust them to do their jobs then you can be ready to deal with those challenges as they come thinking about this as your you mentioned your retiring now after what’s been a significant period in practice how do you think things have changed in terms of people’s approach to work require environments desires writers for joining Etc the workplace in general since you started going down this journey of the sort of lateral hiring and then today so things are always changing you have to be flexible people want different things and you have to try and get into people’s heads to think what do those people want and within your practice it won’t be that everybody wants the same thing so and there’s been many changes in the law I mean when I started in practice you weren’t allowed to advertise for work you clients could come to you of their own vallation but you couldn’t try and take anybody else’s client and there’s been massive changes in marketing of legal practices the recruitment thing is massively different there are many more people coming onto the market as it were and yes people particularly since the pandemic have changed a lot how they want to work I mean the legal profession really did not work from home before the pandemic a few people may have done for particular reasons but in general terms law firms were five days in the office everybody and that wasn’t what people wanted when they came back and you had to be relatively flexible about that because you didn’t want to lose people to firms who were more prepared to have their staff at home but we have always wanted a reasonable presence in the office and that’s for pretty well everybody doing three or four days a week in the office because we see a lot of value in training personally in personal contact with people in going out to see clients together in finding clients together and that’s all quite difficult to do from sitting at home with your laptop but we couldn’t and nor would we say well you either come back five days a week or you know there’ll be trouble sort of thing but I think people have looked long and hard about what they want out of their careers not every a few people did leave the law in general not masses decided that something else was for them and people are working in different ways but the job is still there to do so I think that people do look more now at wanting a work life balance and some people will say right at the start of any recruitment process I will be looking to work at home five days a week and in almost all circumstances we’ll say well actually that’s not for us but thank you for telling us at the beginning as it were but you know people will maybe want to be more involved in management and want their ideas to be taken seriously and being allowed to run with them but I think that’s something that I’ve always been aware of and wanted to do because people feel Freer if they can feel like they’re having some effect and I don’t think the firm is so large that it’s impossible to do that well that’s been something that’s been highlighted a few times the importance of understanding individual strengths and weaknesses and bring brings me on to my next question which was really that this is probably the first interview I’ve done where I’ve been talking to a lawyer where we’ve talked for almost no time around the actual technical practice of being a lawyer and I’m wondering to what extent or when you actually if you did make the shift from being a technician to being more of a of a business person yeah that that was probably quite early in that well I was of the generation where I did all work types when was in my training contract and I carried on doing law for the first four years that I was managing partner and I realised that that was a mistake because I was getting to a stage of I’d do my legal work in the evenings and then I’d be in meetings more or less all day as managing partner and I enjoyed the management more anyway and I felt I could make more of a contribution in that role and so did my fellow Partners so they were happy for me to and I know some firms try and use one of their number who is a almost full-time corporate lawyer to also be the managing partner I don’t think that works and I don’t think it works in a larger firm I think in a small firm that may be needs must and they may have a fee earning Target as well but no I mean I haven’t feared I was 37 when I became managing partner and I think I stopped any legal work at 41 and so that means I haven’t done it without work you know for 20 over 25 years I haven’t done Le work but because I’ve done all sorts of Leal work of course the Law changes and I make sure that I’m fairly well read in what’s changing in everything all the time but it does mean that I do have some knowledge of all work types and can talk reasonably sensibly to heads of departments here and at my previous firm and it’s I don’t think it’s a negative not having carried on fee earning because you’d only have been Fee earning one thing and if you’re going to be a full service Law Firm corporate work isn’t the same as personal injury work you mentioned that you enjoyed the manage management side more was that something that you were aware of early on in your actual technical career certainly for me as soon as I started becoming or practicing I was like this is not for me yeah I mean initially I think I thought I would be a practicing lawyer I think everybody does when they start I run a branch office but because you had to be three years qualified each day somebody would come out from the head office for you know to supervise if you like but I was effectively running an office from one year qualified and so yeah I would have been at that stage about you know 23 24 years old and I realised it was a very small office but I realise the sorts of things that you had to resolve and things that would improve everybody’s working life and ways that you might attract clients I realised at an early stage that I found that more interesting than the actual legal work but I know people who find legal work absolutely fascinating and interestingly those that never decide to stop that want to carry on working forever tend to be people that love legal work not management I I think that there is a I mean people have different views on how long you should operate as managing partner before passing over to somebody else and my experience would be if the firm is going incredibly well then managing Partners tend to stay on longer and if it’s not they might have quite a short tenure a bit like football managers really and but you don’t seem to see many managing Partners not doing any legal work purely managing and 75 years old I mean I think it’s quite a stressful job you know I very much enjoyed it in both firms but you can’t say that it’s and I’m not saying that fee earning these days or being a head of Department none of it is without its stresses but the buck does stop with the management so you know I there aren’t don’t seem to be many that stay around for many years after a normal retirement age yeah it seems to be the sort of last for some and often within firms it’s quite difficult to then find somewhere else to go if you’re going to go back and then be a technician again after having been managed I mean I know my dad is going to be 77 I think this year and he was very much a technical lawyer who enjoyed the inter intellectual aspects of practice and was still doing work as previously a QC and now a KC still for firms you know this year he will still take on pieces of work and I think it’s because he always enjoyed massively that aspect of things where is not you know they did the managerial thing and in a different way and I you know and it’s interesting you talking about doing that so early moving completely because there’s still many who still seem to try to combine the fact of being a technician and a manager which is almost like two sides of you know or two different personalities what I was going to ask you you’ve had a tremendous career you know the results that you’ve achieved across two firms you know absolutely brilliant I don’t think there any there’s no one could dispute that and sometimes at these times it’s quite nice to reflect on your career and sort of highlights have you get any ones that that stand out for you has being particularly fond memories or otherwise I think there’s just many many of them you know they are always going to be if you have a long career which mine is over 40 years there’s going to be quite a lot of times where when the firm did incredibly well in the 100 best companies to work for Sunday times and the very first time I applied in my previous firm we were sixth out of everybody that entered and we weren’t expecting it all having a chat around the table and suddenly you realise and that happened at JMW as well and different sorts of awards and you know having a good year my actual retirement was lovely you know there were many people who wanted to speak to me who sent me emails both from inside the firm and outside and it was it was a special time of its own you know winning occasional large cases is always very satisfying you know because obviously I would know about that even if I wasn’t involved in it somebody joining you who then does really well our London office which as I say literally started as you know having recruited six people day one and promising we wouldn’t take more than one floor in the first year we ended up with two floors and you know taking a risk and then seeing it Go the right way is always you know really enjoyable I’m watching other people flourish who have worked with you and then they move into management roles and you know achieve great things in their roles and you know everybody that I’ve worked with over the years or most people you know I’ve had good relationships with and still have relationships with people from both firms which are friendships so I think I have very much enjoyed my time in the law and you know there have been a lot of special times of course there are times which aren’t so good as well you know but you hope you know yes you probably do remember those but fortunately for me anyway there are less of those than there are good times so yeah that’s what you would want well thank you very much thanks for your time it sounds like your career has been a very rich tapestry and very very successful and I hope that you enjoy whatever you’re going to do next I don’t get the impression it’ll be a complete slowdown and opt out sounds as if that might be difficult for you to do but I’m sure you’ll do a bit more of it yeah we wait and see thank you very much for your time okay well very nice to talk to you and so thanks very much for listening to today’s episode I hope you enjoyed it I hope you’re enjoying our content we’d be delighted to hear any feedback that you have you can find out more about the your Law Firm success podcast at mltdigital.co.uk/podcast Please subscribe please share with your 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