Episode 14 - April Bingham

[00:00] so in today’s edition of the your Law Firm success podcast we talk with April Bingham of Bellwether Green in 2008 during the biggest financial crash of recent history April took the bold decision of starting a law firm a with her husband and to compete against the biggest and most established law firms in the country so April thanks very much for taking some time out of what is inevitably a busy week to chat to me about your Law Firm success could you start by introducing yourself and your firm sure bit please yeah thanks for having me I’m April Bingham I head up corporate at B weather Green and I’m also a co-founder of Bellwether Green we set up the firm in 2008 just as the banking crisis was unfolding but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing for us actually it was a great time it was a turbulent time but a very good time for us to spin out of our a larger firm and try something a bit different about flea of foot and when we left to set up our own firm we wanted to create a boutique firm that was I suppose a challenger firm doing the types of client work that you’d see in the sort of big law  operational on firms but keeping our Boutique size cause we saw that as a huge benefit when we saw other sort of mid-size medium firms frankly imploding in 2008 lost a number of big names from the marketplace and we were so grateful that we were able to sort of be nimble look at pricing at that time look at ways of charging and you know not have the constraints and the burden of you know the history that a lot of law firms have and obviously with that history becomes comes the benefit of experience but often a lot of baggage and bureaucracy that is not all that useful for running a business so we wanted to do something a bit different in hindsight have we done something a bit different well we’re still a law firm and there’s probably only so many ways you can cut that cloth but I think we have managed to maintain we’ve certainly maintained our sort of Boutique ethos Fleet of foot nature we do try and think outside the box a b as business people maybe by using that phrase I’ve just actually not thought out the box but we certainly have achieved one of the things that we wanted to do which is to be getting good quality work and we’re really pleased about that because that really interests The Wider team at the form we’re all kind of ambitious and interested in business and want to be working with businesses that we admire or can really add value to who are working on exciting projects and you mentioned we right at the start so who’s we so founding The Firm there it was myself and my husband John was he your husband at the time he was just newly and we’ve managed to stay that way we had gotten married in the January and set up the firm in July right so we may have been thinking about it on honeymoon right but it was we met working together so it was quite natural for us to work together and you know when we first set up the firm we were very we were super conscious about the sort of husband and wife du  being behind a firm because you don’t want to be pigeon hold with that sort of relationship at the basis of the firm but actually it’s been a great stability for us he has his own team I have my own team I’m a corporate lawyer he’s a real estate lawyer you know we travel and to work together but that’s probably about the last time we see each other until you know 6:00 at night we’ll check in when one or both of us might be you’re leaving so it’s been great to actually have a sort of partner to discuss these things at any given moment and discuss the development of the firm at any given moment but as we’ve kind of established and grown we’ve added other directors and partners to the firm who you know I think Greg in one of your previous podcasts was talking about the leadership team in his firm I thought that was a really interesting take on what’s traditionally just a role of Partners who run a firm but he’s got mixed disciplines in his leadership team and I think that’s really interesting way of looking at it yeah well I mean I think it is more a sort of reflection of broader business and who which firms or prior firms would have been your inspiration if you had any of firms as a corporate lawyer I probably dexal would have been The Firm that I looked at and  thought seemed to be doing something a bit different again the Challenger kind of nature draped in sort of not secrecy but you know low key mystery and I I admire that kind of I suppose just that confidence to not be all singing all dancing we must be full service provider we must be constantly adding people to our number we must be you know doing whatever the latest fad is to promote ourselves I very much appreciate a more kind of understated reputation based success and that’s something we wanted to achieve and is that something that’s borne out over the course of the past what what’s that 20 years not quite 20 I think we’re at so it’s 2008 right yeah so but 16 years well I’d like to think so I I’m pretty biased but I think our reputation does pred us and certainly for my for my corporate team you know we’re ranking in the Experian deals table alongside you know Addleshaw Goddard’s you know the successor firm where I came from alongside other large names in the market place that you know I wouldn’t have dreamed of ranking alongside in terms of deal numbers and quality when we first set out so I think that sort of speaks well to what my certainly my corporate team are doing and I know that the in the real estate side you know the work that is coming in from refers in London would suggest that everybody’s sort of got a great deal of confidence in what they were doing and you mentioned at the outset around the type of firm that you want to create a boutique firm Fleet of foot but prior to us talking about things you mentioned or prior to actually recording you mentioned that as far as you were concerned the most important thing that you wanted to Foster on an ongoing basis good relationships yeah how important have relationships it’s a bit of an obvious question but how important have relationships been yeah over the past two year overall success both on a sort of on a monetary point of view but also in terms of just how much you enjoy your work absolutely fundamental you know we wanted to achieve a reputation for excellence but it doesn’t matter if you’ve got a reputation for excellence if nobody knows about you deals with you interacts with you and so you can’t achieve that in a vacuum and I think I learned quite early on in my legal career I was very fortunate in in many respects I was one of those trainees that just got thrown out the door to go to business development after business development  seminar or meeting or networking event and it really got to cut my teeth really young on what it meant to build a network and it was all new to me you know I really didn’t have any prior experience  hadn’t seen my parents didn’t have any kind of business that required that kind of networking so I did really have to learn from scratch but had a great time doing it and really came to enjoy the relationships that I fostered both through networking and then with clients you know actually making a bit of a difference to someone’s day in terms of how you communicate with them or help them or give them food for thought is for me one of the most rewarding aspects of the job I didn’t realise that would be so quite so important but I suppose on reflection I ended up attracted to a career in- law when I was a teenager I thought it was because I enjoyed an argument it was really watching lawyers in popular culture that made me aspire to be a lawyer but you know looking back realise in popular culture these were interesting characters because of the way they interacted

[10:00] with characters around them okay that’s interesting and so H not just what can I do for other people what can they you know help me with what can they teach me what can they show me what inspiration can they give me that’s been such a massive contributing factor to certainly to my legal career my personal development as a professional and an adviser has all been informed by interactions and relationships with other people whether that’s other lawyers or clients because you mentioned Catherine Hyde earlier who I did a podcast recording with and she felt that in certain of her previous roles she’d been unable she felt to develop proper relationships with her clients primarily because of the pressure of the billable hour what are your thoughts on that I don’t find the and I know this is a huge Topic at the moment I don’t find the billable hour prohibitive or necessarily  counterintuitive when it comes to building relationships because I had an example last year where a private Equity Firm who instructed us to do the first deal we’ done for them I’d say I’d gotten to the point through networking and you know them introducing me to a few other people just because they didn’t have a deal prior to this point that would necessarily be a fit for our firm I got to the point you know almost at a friendly stage you know I would call them friends now but you know I’d gotten to the point where you almost wonder will it be a bit awkward if I do work for this person or these people and I’m charging them you know my full hourly rate which I have to charge them because if it’s not for that client it has to be you know as a boutique firm the one thing you are conscious of your hours are precious and you must recover at the best rate you can because you’re not doing Turn you’re doing specialist advice and so  I wondered how that would pan out but actually you know in the end  you know they were just extremely grateful for the value ad and sort of couldn’t really have gone any better and they were absolutely fine with the billable hour maybe because in private Equity people are often former you know accountants or professionals themselves they’re used to the concept of bailable hour but it’s just one example of where we’ve had a really happy client at the end of a deal and I feel that if your client feels you’ve added value and really put in a shift for them they value your time and they know that if they’ve not manage to monopolise your time someone else will and so they are happy to pay yeah a reasonable fee for your time well it sounds of from your earlier description that what you really value in a situation is where you’re making an impact on somebody’s life and you feel that you have helped them or helped them solve a problem and that your legal training and the law is a mechanism absolutely for that rather than maybe that some people go into practicing law because you actually have a real interest in the discipline itself rather than the relational aspects of it yeah I think that’s fair the there is a there is a slightly geeky side of me that does enjoy the analytical quiet reflection of problem solving and reducing you know even precedents and statutes down to a solution I do quite enjoy that challenge but it’s not ever again done in a vacuum it’s always with a view to well how can I help achieve this client’s objectives how can I take what appear to be barriers or h a set of circumstances and find the most advantageous outcome for the client I do enjoy that kind of academic challenge but it’s meaningless unless it’s actually being applied practically and helping as you say helping someone a problem how have you ended up dividing your responsibilities amongst you your husband in terms of management who’s in who’s doing sales who’s doing integration who’s doing operations how have you divvied that up well I think in terms of leadership team we’ve got colleagues who do tend to deal with most operational aspects you know the board have to make decisions on  strategic things on hires and whether we’re going ahead with certain projects or not but we’re very lucky to have very long-standing leadership team I think work winning is down to individual teams so the corporate team are winning work from two or three sources real estate team from others employment from others so it boils down to the team responsibility to win work for each department but I think actually probably because we are a boutique everybody who’s in The Firm is immeshed in the sort of entrepreneurial Spirit of the firm so everything is framed in what does this mean for the firm is this an opportunity for the firm how can the firm leverage or benefit from this but at the same time the firm itself is so kind of focused on service and providing solutions to clients that you know those two things end up inextricably linked I the work that you have spoken about you talked about beginning to do work that was big law so obviously going in as a new brand with some relationships that you developed what are the levers that you have pulled to deliver the level of new business that’s required when you’ve been competing against better known and more significant or more established firms well realising that relationships mattered so much it probably took it probably took a couple of years into business to kind of distils down where work was coming from I think in the first two years of business the relationships that helped were people who we knew people we’ worked with in the past came looking for us you know the power of LinkedIn and you know it doesn’t take people long to find out what you’re what you’re up to so those historic relationships were really beneficial in the early days and it’s a lovely swell of help that you get when well I I’ve certainly found this and I’ve seen it happen for friends and other people when you set up your own business people want to help you they want to support you and give you work and so that we had a sort of very soft Landing into the world of business and had you know clients virtually from day one but we soon realised as we started to employ people and grow a little that we needed to sort of bolster and reinforce work sources so we look to kind of identify where are the main places that we get work and  we realised that other professional advisers accountants for me surveyors for real estate for instance insolvency practitioners for asset recovery debt recovery these were obviously a key kind of connection to have and we realised as a boutique firm we don’t have all the time in the world or hundreds of pairs of boots on the ground so we have to be extremely Discerning with our time because we are as you see I think as one of your other podcast guest called it producers of work so our time is not got it’s got to be used as efficiently as possible for business development so we looked at other professional advisors we realised  actually concentrating on them as referrers rather than trying to speak to every last person at a networking do was going to produce much faster stronger results in terms of work wins because a soft introduction one refer is capable of introducing you to so many different clients and you know sounds ridiculously simple when I say that now two years into business this was all new to me learning curve you know had to actually work this out as we experienced it so professional other professional visors are a huge pillar in terms of our go to Business Development the other area that we identified and hadn’t really appreciated until we’re probably mature enough to appreciate it I’d always thought when I was a junior lawyer if I went to a networking event and it was filled with other lawyers I roll my eyes and curl my lip and oh it’s full of other lawyers not realising at all in my naivety how much scope there is for work to be exchanged between

[20:00] lawyers of different practice areas of different firms of different jurisdictions and actually um we very quickly realised that um other law firms in Scotland who aren’t doing corporate work might need assistance um we’d actually been referred some bits and pieces from High Street firms and the penny dropped that actually this is a market place for corporate expertise I have to give credit to my um husband in that he had probably well before me realised the value in doing work with other lawyers because as a Scottish property lawyer he realised that a great deal of his work was the Scottish end of much larger UK wide projects because of the difference in jurisdiction yeah and so he’d already for significant part of his career been doing a lot of work with firms either in London or the regions and so for him it wasn’t an alien concept at all and he already had established relationships and continues to Foster and build relationships with um English lawyers in their firms and has done that very successfully but for me it was more of a penny drop that actually there is a lot of value that we can exchange between Scott even between Scottish law firms and not firms of the same practice area yeah so the idea was born  maybe sort of by the time really formalised it was maybe about 2014 something like that to create a more formal Network which we called rather unimaginatively commercial law Network on reflection it’s not as catchy as something like hey legal which is a great yeah great brand name but we just wanted it to be descriptive what you that’s what it says on the 10 it’s a network for other law firms who want to refer commercial work you know it’s not their practice area and they want to refer commercial work to Bellwether Green so that’s how the network was born so we have professional advisers and other disciplines lawyers and then the third sort of the best possible way of getting other work is existing clients and I just I call that the whiskey because it’s something that you know this Still’s over time and you can only we could never have had that at the beginning of the firm only now 16 years down the line do we have the wonderful luxury of clients coming back to us you know 10 years on 5 years on from other work that we’ve done of course you’ve got certain types of clients who are using you all the time but in my practice area you know you start every new Financial year with an empty pipeline because I’m transaction based once you’ve done a deal you need you know you need to find the next deal to do but I just had a lovely example about 3 months ago a client got in touch he was responding to an email I had sent him in 2013 right I had at that point advised him on some share options he was being given as an employee yes and he emailed me in response to 2013 email saying hope you’re well you know I’m now buying the company so could you support me in the management buyout it was just such a lovely email to receive that he remembered that he still had the email that things had come full circle for him he was buying the company for an eight figure sum he done tremendously well and of course I was delighted of course to help him I mean it’s just exactly the kind of deal we like to be doing so the three areas have been relationships with other professions of course your existing client base and understanding the importance of that and  I suppose you know thinking about that from a commercial transaction point of view you are more likely in that area to get a bit more repeat work due to the nature of I imagine some of the clients you engage with whether it’s private Equity VC yeah acquire side and investment side yeah and also the solicitors because the other examples of good networks would be the sort of connect the law but that’s more of a sort of general practice type offering or Digby Browns compensate which is very specific around Pi I suppose yours is a bit more similar to that and that it’s a very specific type of work that you’re looking to help other lawyers out with yeah I think that’s exactly right and I have to say Digby Brown again an good example of relationships being helpful when we set up the network I’d met a couple of folk from Digby Brown I think because they were telling us about as you say their Network I think they’ve rebranded to recover have for their network but they’d come in to tell us about their Network exactly  you know to say if you ever have any personal injury work you might want to think about us so we’d met them before when they heard that we were setting up commercial law Network they invited us into their office and sat down and said what can we do to help and just apropos of nothing they were just so supportive David Wilson and Katie who was there at the time invited us in and just said look strikes us we’re talking to a similar audience you know High Street Niche General firms across Scotland were not competing with each other in terms of our networks we’re both offering something very niche as you say you know if there’s anything we can do to help let us know and you know why don’t you come and join a panel at one of our conferences and that it was just the beginning of a beautiful relationship and that they’ve just been so helpful and supportive and we’ve tried to reciprocate to the greatest extent Possible having you know Catherine Hart from Digby Brown is a fantastic practice management lawyer and speaker on ethics and Welfare so I’ve known Catherine since I was maybe about 20 yeah well you know and she’s still only 21 so that’s miraculous yes no she’s fantastic and she’s been so well received as a speaker at various events that we’ve run so but she’s not the only one that’s helped us Gordon D’s helped as well speaking and right bit of a digression but it’s just a really nice example of other lawyers was you know not that much to gain from being helpful to us being really supportive and I think that kind of lawyers working together is a really powerful dynamics that can come out of almost out of the blue so the message I’m getting from this is it’s very important not to treat other lawyers with suspicion yeah in the majority of cases of course you’ll end up getting your fingers burned on occasion as you would doing any other profession but that in actual fact your profession by and large can be a source of new business friendship Mutual support and help yeah I would say that the profession is generally quite Collegiate and of course there’s competition we all need competition to drive us forward so even that of itself is helpful we need competitors or we would have nowhere to go and I think that yeah my experience has been  extremely positive in meeting lawyers from other practice areas other types of firms and other you know even dealing with Advocates as more often as I’ve gotten and more experienced you know is rare that I would need to be involved with an advocate in my day-to-day legal work but if I was helping with a complex corporate problem then sometimes I may work with an advocate and that’s been massively rewarding and enjoyable as well just looking at the different way that they will analyse a problem and in some ways how helpful it is for them not to have the commercial pressures when they’re thinking about legal problems one of the really nice things so with the network we do lots of events to help members of the network and remind them look we’re here here’s how we can help you if you need a certain kind of help for your clients one of the nice things that’s transpired is we actually do a lot of work with firms themselves we’ve done a lot of succession planning with firms whether that’s handing the baton to a sort of Quasi management buyout team or mergers of practices full retirements and shutdowns of practices sadly which seems a bit of a shame when there hasn’t been a route to pass on  I suppose the heritage of a firm at the very least but we’ve certainly helped with also LLP drafting LLP agreements partners coming and going fortunately we’ not I’ve not had to involve my colleague in disputes yeah but yeah it’s been nice actually working on the firms themselves business structures and helping firms with their own business not just stepping in and

[30:00] helping their clients when they need a bit of corporate advice and through the years as the network has matured there’s certainly of course some firms who use us and lean on us more regularly than others in part because they have a client base that throws off more corporate work but also because there’s probably some firms where I feel like the relationship has strengthened over time between you know perhaps me and one of the partners at that firm or one of my colleagues and another counterpart at their firm and we try and look for opportunities to foster that as much as possible one of the things that we do annually is our state of the profession dinner which is a really nice time to it’s usually just a round table of 10 under Chatham House Rule nothing leaves the room but you know I can probably speak in Broad themes we’ll invite the partners of 10 of Our member firms and just for a gab just for a moon if they want compare War Stories tell us what they’re doing that’s really working you know enjoy whatever success they’re having at the time and it’s really interesting to hear the similarities across different discipline firms but also the I suppose some of the unique issues that tend to come up for law firms and lawyers trying you talked earlier about lawyers being both producers or fearers and running a business I mean it isn’t necessarily easy and not all lawyers are necessarily yeah cut out for running a business not all people who are running business are necessarily equipped to do what they’re trying to do but I think in a supportive environment that anyone can improve and just take small nuggets away that will help them maybe manage their time better or delegate better allowing them to do more for earning if they have to or making them take a step back and look at their business so we’ve found that the people who come along to the state of the profession dinner do like the chance sort of offload among peers compare notes but also they value it highly as a way of kind of stepping out of the day-to-day turn of their legal work or even just the day-to-day management but looking at more strategic side of their business and where they’re and what they might bring under review and we’ve tried to where we can add as supp a bit of value is with our kind of networks in the business community and so we run the annual conference which I know you’ve yeah you’ve very kindly spoken up for us imagine it was a highlight what’s that I imagine it was a highlight it was a highlight you had you had a tough gig because it was our first in-person conference after covid and so it was you know it was difficult to sort of get people people out but a few years down the line now we’re getting back to the sorts of numbers in attendance that we would have had pre-co which is lovely to is that why I don’t get invited anymore no I think one of your colleagues is coming this year and the  tell me what worries you probably the unknown I don’t particularly worry about anything I’m aware of if that makes sense you know I supposed to expect like lockdown didn’t see that coming obviously that worried me when it happened because suddenly transactions we were working on ground to Hal across the team across the firm and I suddenly didn’t know where we would be earning fees well maybe that was a wrong question more because we’ve had a quite a lot of positive chat and I’m quite Keen always to try and strike a balance so that people understand yeah there’s a lot of positive chat there’s lots of things that have gone well in terms of relationship building the focus on the Excellence reputation but there will be things that keep you awake at night in relation to your work or that you wake up at maybe 2 or 3 in the morning and you’re like oh man I’ve got this to deal with most people do maybe you’ll be very lucky certainly if you don’t but we have touched a bit upon the business owner versus the MH producer or the technician I mean if there’s not anything then it’s not you need to say something I know I’m come up with something I do find it quite hard and this is maybe why we may be destined to remain a boutique for I do worry about I know how sort of discerning I try to be when I’m producing my work and I think well of course I am because I’ve got an absolute bested interest in doing that I it’s my business and I suppose I do worry that as we add to the team is that kind of I suppose driver Miss for people who are sorry employed in the team you know they’ve not got the drive that I have to make sure everything is just yeah perfect so I suppose so the kind of thing that I would wake up about in the middle of the night might be have we got that right have we got that answer right or have we remembered to do that has someone working on this remember to do that and that’s a struggle when you’re delegating cause you’ve got to trust people and you’ve got to let people who are senior get on with deals autonomously I can’t be omnipotent and on everything all the time so supposed to do worry about making sure that the culture is strong enough that everyone’s applying the high standards I would like to be applied to the work that we’re producing and how I Foster that without creating a Draconian environment because I would never want our firm to be a place that’s not enjoyable or you know a place that people want to work but but I do want it to be absolutely serious about producing the best that we can produce well it’s very hard I think when you’re at a particular size in that you bring people in because you think they’ll be able to achieve the same standards as you and then you and then you understand that people think in different ways and some people require more of a structure and training and those principles being integrated into the business in a more formal way which is quite difficult when you’re actually being the technician yourself yeah I think in some ways we’ve had it easy because of the way the firms had relatively slow and steady growth so the senior fee earners in The Firm have grown up and developed beside well in my team beside me or in John’s case beside him or there’s maybe been lateral hires that have come in in litigation and employ who had very solid large firm trainings and you know so for years they’ve understood the importance of these things but I think you know for junior team members coming in we’re making sure that these standards are ingrained yes and that’s a challenge that’s something I’m sort of actively thinking about and looking at and wondering you know how are we going to make sure because we’re obviously Generations are going to continue to come into the firm with any luck so how do we make sure there’s almost in a sort of Academy style development of Junior lawyers it’s something that I’ve struggled with in my business that’s only really been addressed since we took on a managing director and he has been able to implement for us ways of working and standards and organisation and hierarchy that I found impossible it’s just not in my wheel as they say but I now understand how important it is and how people suffer when it’s lacking and I’m not saying that’s the case with you but it is something I think that’s it’s that’s not a law firm specific issue it’s a general business issue yeah I would yeah having spoken to quite a lot of people quite a big cross-section of people probably try and work out the answer myself I would say it’s something that I’ve seen come up across the board so that is an issue for management in The Firm I don’t know that it worries me if that’s the right you know way of describing it but it’s a challenge an internal challenge for the firm definitely okay well April thank you very much sorry for like forcing you to come out with a sort of downer at the end no that’s okay thank you very much for your time and best of luck thank you so thanks very much for listen l in to today’s episode I hope you enjoyed it I hope you’re enjoying our content we’ll 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 friends please share with anyone who you know that you think would be interested.