There are few clearer-eyed law firm leaders in the market than FBC Manby Bowdler’s managing director Neil Lloyd. Since April 2020, Lloyd has been leading the way on a business plan that is all about putting simplicity of purpose at the centre of strategic growth. In practice, that means staying true to the firm’s principles, measuring what can be measured (most notably regular employee engagement with a view to improving health and wellbeing), and delivering good value to clients for a fair – but not cheap – price.
The latter is a particular bugbear of Lloyd’s, a former banker who has more of a focus than most on the fundamentals such as profit, overheads and lockup. In terms of work, it means increasingly high-profile practices in clinical negligence (with associate Michael Portman-Hann recently featuring on Newsnight), commercial property, insolvency, hospitality and franchising alongside one of the firm’s traditional strengths, conveyancing. At the end of 2022 the results were tangible – the firm had opened more new matters in November than in any month over the previous two years and revenue was heading in the right direction.