Herbert Smith Freehills (HSF) has launched a new strategy for the future of the firm following a “socialist” six-month consultation with partners and business services staff.
The strategy is named “beyond 2020” and sees the firm “move away from the post-merger integration period” and into “implementation”, said co-chief executive Mark Rigotti.
Rigotti and co-head Sonya Leydecker aim to get business services leaders and associates, and not just partners, involved in delivering the new strategy to the firm. The consultation involved Rigotti and Leydecker holding 40 workshops with partners and business services staff.
“We were quite surprised that there was much more of an appetite for doing new things than we had previously thought,” said Leydecker.
The firm’s previous business strategy was drawn up following the merger of Herbert Smith and Freehills in 2012 and set out plans for the next three years. This October will mark the fourth anniversary of the merger.
Beyond 2020 will “try to look beyond the traditional two or three-year plans towards some of the things we’d like to achieve,” Rigotti said, adding it was “built around a simple premise: that we do want to be a global firm.”
“We think the market will continue to globalise and consolidate and to be competitive we need to do some things differently,” he added.
The new strategy focuses on five points: clients, sectors and products; people, performance and leadership; service delivery; innovation and technology; and platform.
More tangibly, the strategy will see the firm move away from the umbrella practice groups of corporate and litigation towards a structure that prioritises sectors. Rigotti said they wanted to make sure every lawyer at HSF is a “sector specialist”.
The priority sectors are: energy, banks, financial buyers, real estate, TMT, infrastructure and transport, mining, consumer products, pharma and healthcare.
The new strategy also aims to “strengthen the firm’s platform to support clients in key markets including Asia, EMEA and the US”. This could result in a number of new offices as well as growth in jurisdictions including South Africa, Saudi Arabia and Germany.
Rigotti said planned growth in the US could see the firm consider its options for a transatlantic merger. He said: “At the moment we have a small disputes office in New York and lots of people servicing US clients in offices around the world. Does that really stack up when you get to 2025? It doesn’t feel like it does.”
Leydecker added: “We’ve had a big merger that’s been successfully implemented and that’s made us very conscious of the work you have to do to make a successful merger happen.”
The strategy will focus on growing HSF’s legal services centres in Belfast and Perth and roll out twice as many project managers across its global offices. This will be supported by a new focus on technology, innovation and remote working to facilitate more cross-border mandates.
HSF also intends to establish new legal services centres in the coming years, with plans to launch smaller additional centres across Europe and Asia.
The strategy has also seen the roll-out of agile working across its Asia and Australia offices, seven months after it was made a permanent feature of the London office. All of HSF’s global offices are now signed up to its ‘working smarter’ agile working programme.
The focus on innovation will see HSF create an internal team to lead on creating new ideas, though it has yet to appoint its members or head.
Leydecker said the “next phase” of HSF’s global strategy will “help us achieve our vision to be a leading professional services business”.
Rigotti added the firm had witnessed “transformational change” and would continue to build on the “momentum” of the 2012 merger.
HSF’s financial results will be released in July. Last year the firm turned over £815m, a rise of 2 per cent on 2013/14. Profit was up 12 per cent to £259.5m and average profit per equity partner (PEP) was up 8 per cent to £801,000.
Over the last 12 months the firm has prioritised panel appointments, increasing the number of panels it sits on from 25 to 140. New panel appointments include Royal Mail, EDF and Travis Perkins.
It also opened a 240-lawyer global alternative legal services offering from its Belfast hub last June and started the roll-out of project managers across its sector groups and jurisdictions worldwide in the same month.
HSF has opted for change in the Middle East in recent months, first consolidating its Abu Dhabi office with all lawyers moving into its Dubai base, then reopening in Riyadh two years after its exit. Meanwhile, it has grown in Africa and Europe, launching in Johannesburg at the end of last year and opening its third German office in Düsseldorf in February.
The firm made up 20 partners this year, including 10 across the UK and EMEA and a further 10 in Asia-Pacific.