Clifford Chance partners urged to share contacts for good of corporate
Clifford Chance’s management has urged partners to help boost its corporate practice by leveraging the firm’s prized banking relationships and fostering a culture of cross-referrals.
David Childs
Firm leaders at this month’s annual partnership conference in Barcelona called on partners to avoid building silos and be aware of the corporate opportunities that client contacts can bring.
The two-day event addressed partners’ need to “realise that a capital markets or finance [client] is also useful for corporate”, according to a partner, as well as urging them to keep in close communication with their colleagues in Asia and Australia.
A London partner said: “[The message was] to take advantage of our strength among financial institutions as they change and be able to leverage that into the corporate arena. I took that away as being a real opportunity - siloes are not allowed to be built up.”
The partner added: “It’s just making sure if you sit in London and advise a client you might not think that an Australian partner might bring something to the table.”
Another partner who was present commented: “Finance contacts that give us banking-type work are big corporates and do things that any corporate does. We should be getting a bigger share of that than we are. The leveraging of finance relationships in corporate was part of a building-up-of-corporate theme more generally [at the conference].”
Malcolm Sweeting
The leaders also vowed to continue the sector-based approach and grow the US business, with the magic circle firm’s practice stateside hit by a number of litigation departures in recent years, including that of national practice head Juan Morillo last year (9 May 2011).
Senior partner Malcolm Sweeting and global managing partner David Childs both spoke at the two-day event. Sweeting’s presentation touched on communication and global opportunities, while Childs focused to a greater extent on the issue of referrals and leveraging client relationships.
The conference, held at the Hotel Rey Juan Carlos I in the Spanish city on 15 and 16 June, consisted of meetings punctuated by two plenary sessions at the start and finish.
Clifford Chance’s partner retreats tend to focus on large-scale strategic issues rather than nitty-gritty financial or political matters such as partnership reshapes or performance management, with last year’s meeting in London addressing the firm’s plans to conquer the Asian market (4 July 2011).
One partner commented: “It’s for firing people with enthusiasm, not firing people.”
Readers' comments (8)
Anonymous | 26-Jun-2012 9:29 am
Sensible idea by all means, but not exactly groundbreaking. Haven't most firms been working to improve levels of cross-referrals between departments?
Not really sure why it takes a partnership conference to state the obvious, unless CC have been historically poor at this, in which case there's a lot of work they may have missed out on!
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Anonymous | 26-Jun-2012 10:09 am
Not quite sure how this is news, other than highlighting how backward the legal sector can appear to be. Some of the quotes are pretty embarrassing coming from a business that size.
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Anon | 26-Jun-2012 11:34 am
Not to mention senior associates who won't delegate to juniors, juniors who won't delegate to those lower down the pecking order.
Keep all the billable work for yourself was the CC motto when I worked there, despite all the spin about the value of team players.
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Anonymous | 26-Jun-2012 12:00 pm
Surely CC haven't had a partnership conference dedicated to such childishly basic stuff as this? All of this should be obvious to a 14 year old of average intelligence. If they have, the mind boggles. What will be the topic of their next partnership conference? Whether the Pope is catholic? What bears do in the woods?
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Anonymous | 26-Jun-2012 12:52 pm
There are a lot of blindingly obvious initiaitives that lawyers don't do in practice and some of the biggest culprits are the more mature partners and the largest firms who can ignore and resist the need to change. So no harm in going back to basics and re-stating the obvious now and then. In fact, there should be a lot more of it.
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Anonymous | 26-Jun-2012 1:02 pm
As a city lawyer who moved to the North East, let me tell you that the North East firms are much more protectionist about their clients. Cross referrals have yet to take off here.
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anon | 26-Jun-2012 2:11 pm
That this needs to be done just goes to show once again how staggeringly badly managed law firms are compared to businesses in other sectors.
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Tonia | 26-Jun-2012 5:55 pm
Could this firm sound anymore childish?
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