This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Nico Beedle, 41, a lawyer who lives in London and cofounded the boutique firm Merali Beedle in 2016. The firm now has more than 70 lawyers. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.
I started my career at a big international firm in the city and then moved to a more boutique, but still pretty big, traditional firm. Both are very good, but when I was in my early 30s, I was really fed up with being a lawyer.
Adam Merali, my business partner, had set up a law firm because he needed legal services for some of his other business interests.
Like me, Adam had been fed up with being a lawyer because he felt he had too little control over his work and was not properly rewarded for his time.
At that point, he and I had been friends for about 20 years. I had quit law to work out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. Adam asked if I wanted to be a consultant for him on the side, and I agreed.
In a traditional law firm, you have a partnership where the people at the top own it. They employ everyone else. The owners then take the profits, minus the overhead.
Adam’s view, in terms of what we would do as a firm, was to use a fee-share model where lawyers are heavily incentivized for what they do, which was very unusual in the legal market. That’s what makes us different from the vast majority of other firms.
Suddenly, Adam and I were really enjoying being lawyers again, because rather than someone slamming some work on your desk and saying, “Do this,” it was a case of someone saying, “Do you want X thousand pounds to do this bit of work for me?”
About a decade ago, Adam and I said we should commit to this full time — and see if other people wanted to work with us on the same basis.
What sets us apart
Our model, in a nutshell, is that we have a brilliant operational team who are our employees. We then recruit senior lawyers, who aren’t salaried, and instead take home 75% of what they bill. By contrast, traditional firms tend to pay about 25% to 30% of what someone bills as salary.
In terms of how the world has changed and how I think people view their careers, the traditional model was very much a case of, “You do your time and you’ll be rewarded” — to the point at which you’re overrewarded.
I think millennials like me and Gen Z are generally less willing to make that trade, which is to have less control earlier in their career in the hope of a payoff.
Now, once you make partner, you still have to work really hard, if not harder. Back in the day, partners might have been in the bar or on the golf course.
A few years ago, someone made an analogy I really like: In traditional law, becoming a partner is like a pie-eating contest where the prize is more pies. If you become an equity partner, you’re making a lot of money, but there’s no taking your foot off the gas.
My perspective is that careers and where people work are more fluid than they used to be. People aren’t looking to work their way up for the rest of their lives. I think people, on the whole, are less willing to deal with suffering and levels of stress that aren’t particularly healthy.
At our firm, it’s helpful knowing that you’re not being judged by benchmarks and that you’re just doing your own thing. We have some brilliant lawyers who are parents of young kids who may be billing 20% compared to someone who is absolutely going for it and wants to join our model because they’re going to take home a lot of money.
Both of those individuals are equally important in terms of the culture of the business. And many early hires were via our flexible working platform, which champions women in the workplace. It’s very difficult for women after having children to get back into big law, especially at the more senior level, because you might be looking for fixed hours, you might be looking for four days a week. This is not a criticism of those firms, but the nature of our industry doesn’t favor those kinds of conditions.
We say to someone, “Do as much as you feel comfortable with,” and they fit it around their life.
Finding happiness
Many of the people we’ve had join us have been friends with or ex-colleagues of people who already work for us. We’ve grown nicely over the last 10 years. We could be at least twice or three times this size if we’d taken a more aggressive hiring policy and maybe dropped the quality levels a little bit.
The fact that we’ve kept quality high and tended to hire people our lawyers already know has been really helpful with the cultural side of things.
Recently, one of our lawyers came up to me and asked if I could take on something for him. He’s done the same when I’ve asked. But compared with traditional law firms, he’s not putting something on my desk that I don’t want to be doing. I’m going to make some money from it, and he doesn’t have to take on more work that makes him more stressed. It’s like a grown-up trade.
If you ask my friends or family about how I seem to be doing in my life since I changed jobs, it’s so different. That ripple effect of not being miserable in your job is huge.
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