Reviewed by: Eduardo Reyes
Author: Patricia Wheatley Burt
Publisher: The Law Society
ISBN: 9781853286971
Price: £99.00

Leadership for Law Firms: after the Legal Services Act is a report based on interviews with around 70 managing partners, and builds on previous work by author Patricia Wheatley Burt, including two books, Profitable Performance Management, and The Role of the Managing Partner.

The 70 managing partners interviewed for the report range from the smallest to the largest practices, and their conclusions about the role of leadership in firms, Wheatley Burt notes, are surprisingly consistent across the full range of firms.

Her key contentions are that huge change, in the shape of globalisation, economic instability technological developments, and regulatory reform, mean that more than ever, law firms need to be led by individuals who can provide ‘the direction, vision, empathy and guidance’ necessary. This also requires managing partners who do not confuse ‘leadership’ with ‘management’.

Wheatley Burt is especially critical of managing partners who complain that leading law firms is ‘like herding cats’. In her view this view of ‘pushing’ partners is not the same as leading them. DLA Piper’s Sir Nigel Knowles is a better model, she suggests, when he argues: ‘Strategy, structure and systems are all capable of being driven top down, into the business.’

She is interested in the idea of non-lawyer, non-fee earner leaders, citing Manches and BLG Singapore as firms that have taken this step, though she does not find this to be right for all firms.

Leadership for Law Firms is an interesting report, produced at an apt time. It does have some faults. Partners who have spent any time at business school may feel that some standard business school analysis tools, or an attempt to ‘model’ success, would have added greater rigour. And her tendency to use long list of bullet points (many points over 130 words long), could be easier to follow.

One can also imagine the managing partner who falls short of her ideal, but who lacks self-knowledge, going down some of the lists of attributes for the ideal leader, ticking qualities they actually don’t possess.

Bearing that last point in mind, perhaps this report is actually most useful for the general partnership of firms, who, when asking if they have the right leader, or which candidate in an election may deliver long-term prosperity for the partnership, could usefully measure incumbents and contenders against the leadership attributes Wheatley Burt has identified.

She is certainly right to assert that there has rarely been a more important time to take care in choosing the leader of a law firm. For firms of all sizes, the immediate future contains both huge challenges and significant opportunities. This is a timely report.

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Eduardo Reyes is commissioning/ features editor of the Law Society Gazette.

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