Gunning for success

November 2015 marked a milestone for Manchester law firm gunnercooke, as it appointed its 100th partner and doubled its headcount in only one year. It is set to double in size again by the end of 2016, sealing its place as one of the fastest-growing law firms in the country.

Founded in Manchester in 2010 by Darryl Cooke and Sarah Goulbourne, gunnercooke has evolved from being a solely corporate and private equity boutique into a full-service corporate and commercial law firm, offering services across all sectors, including retail, logistics and financial services.

However, what makes gunnercooke stand out from the pack is its innovative approach to delivering legal services to businesses, alongside its working model that is attracting a rapidly growing number of senior lawyers. It operates on a very different model to the traditional law firm: it does not have a traditional partnership structure and its lawyers do not bill on a hourly rate. All its partners are self-employed with a minimum of 10,000 hours practising experience, and offer a fixed fee to their clients.

A better way

The idea for gunnercooke was hatched in 2006 and borne out of Cooke’s dissatisfaction with what he perceived as fundamental flaws in the traditional law firm model. After many years of successful practice at SJ Berwin, Addleshaw Goddard and finally DLA Piper, where he headed the private equity group, Cooke felt that the legal industry needed to fundamentally change to put the client first. ‘At the time, I thought there was a better way of delivering legal services, and that law firms didn’t really understand what was truly important to clients,’ he says.

As the initial idea for the business began to take shape, Cooke asked 56 chief executives, finance directors, heads of legal and funders what they disliked most about law firms. ‘The answers were very consistent: they didn’t like the uncertainty of fees and the hourly sheet model or the lack of commercial nous in lawyers, and they were particularly averse to junior lawyers working on matters. The gunnercooke model, I believe, actually answers those complaints.’

The culture gunnercooke builds for its lawyers, Cooke explains, helps to provide better value to its clients by offering a better life for its lawyers and making it easier for them to deliver great work. Fees are agreed and fixed at the outset. ‘We feel the value of the advice, and not the cost of providing it, should determine what the client pays,’ explains Cooke.

The lawyers of gunnercooke are retained and remunerated on a commission basis – they can earn as much or as little as they like. They are expected to set themselves objectives and meet them, but how they choose to do that is largely up to them. However, they are measured against key performance indicators and receive additional rewards for referring clients to other partners to keep client work within the business. ‘The client doesn’t really care how many hours you put in – they just want exceptional service,’ declares Cooke. ‘By moving away from that model and doing away with timesheets, we can give a better service by not having to set seven hours each day down, and free our partners to provide whatever extra help is needed.’

Cooke believes that having all partners on a profit share helps foster a more commercial approach. ‘From the outset, we felt that by allowing lawyers to become more entrepreneurial and take control of their lives, they would be much more content in their work. You can choose the gunnercooke model for the flexible lifestyle or for the financial benefits. Lawyers with a large following will receive a large proportion of the fees themselves, and will be better off with us than they would be at another firm.

‘At the same time, our partners can choose to take four weeks off, or work till they are 80.’

How exactly does gunnercooke support its lawyers in the leap to this new kind of working? ‘Obviously, technical excellence is a given,’ says Cooke, ‘but we expect our lawyers to come to us well-trained with a business plan and new ideas. We then work with them on a personal level to develop.’ The training at gunnercooke has a particular focus on business development, client service and pricing. The most commercially ambitious lawyers have access to executive coaches for 1:1 coaching, plus sales support and training. ‘But if some lawyers are with us mainly for the lifestyle, then as long as the quality of their work is good and they enhance our brand and values, we will support them as far as they want,’ explains Cooke.

So how does the business model embed and support a sense of teamwork and direction across the firm? ‘Teamwork is actually far stronger here than in any law firm I have worked in,’ answers Cooke. ‘We have some very large clients that need a lot of support, and that can only happen if they are comfortable with our lawyers. There is a lot of teamwork in that regard. On a larger project, we might have a lot of partners working together, so we’ve worked very hard to incorporate technology into the business that facilitates teamwork. As a sole practitioner or in a smaller firm, you wouldn’t have the same depth of experience in the team – our lawyers recognise that there is strength in depth. Our social events are very highly attended – the better networked you are internally, the more likely you are to be included in group work.’

At the moment, gunnercooke has 110 partners. It has a consultancy practice with 30 consultants working with large multinationals, and operating partners working in the private equity market. It has a venture capital arm in London. It is also developing its own charity. ‘It shouldn’t be just about growth and profit – we need to be part of the wider community,’ says Cooke. ‘We are evolving as a much broader professional services practice.’

Joint venture

In January 2015, gunnercooke entered into a joint venture with start-up firm Ignition Law, providing office space and back-office support services. Ignition provides corporate, commercial and employment advice to technology businesses, start-up businesses and entrepreneurs. It uses gunnercooke’s London and Manchester offices to meet clients. Cooke explains how the founders of Ignition were attracted to gunnercooke because it had already disrupted the market for legal services. They were keen to build a brand and an offering that would focus solely on technology, and on fast-growing start-up businesses seeking investment.

While Ignition is now a trading name of gunnercooke, it has its own separate brand, because its lawyer founders were keen to tap into the Shoreditch tech start-up market. Cooke explains: ‘Many larger law firms state that they have a “start-up” offering, but they don’t dedicate a resource to specifically catering for that market. Ignition is that solution. Their lawyers are younger, entrepreneurial and dynamic – they have big plans to offer online legal packages and they are really developing their reputation as a technology specialist. We are delighted to work with them, as our two brands really complement each other.’ In addition to back-office support, gunnercooke’s pool of senior lawyers can assist Ignition with specialist client matters on tax and insurance.

Nursery practice

Then there is gunnerbloom, a Manchester ‘nursery’ practice launched by Cooke in early 2016 and staffed by young lawyers who will be given full responsibility for generating work and running the business. Unusually, gunnerbloom lawyers will not specialise for the first three years of their training, to allow them to develop their broader commercial knowledge. Any profits will be reinvested back into the business. So why did Cooke decide to deviate from the very successful gunnercooke model for this venture?

‘All the attributes we want from a gunnercooke partner will be instilled in our gunnerbloom lawyers. Once gunnerbloom lawyers reach seven years’ PQE, they will move over to gunnercooke, taking their own client bases with them’

‘It would damage our brand,’ Cooke answers. ‘If a client comes to gunnercooke, they can be sure that they will only be dealing with lawyers with significant experience under their belts; we felt that junior lawyers just didn’t fit within our business model. At the same time, we felt a certain amount of guilt that we were taking the best senior lawyers from other firms and not actually investing in young talent.’ In response to the criticism that many lawyers are unable to understand the implications of their advice in a commercial context, Cooke felt that the easiest and best way to do things was to set up a new brand that directly addressed the commercial development and training of young lawyers.

At gunnerbloom, lawyers will spend time every year operating on secondment within a business, developing their business skills, and in their third year, will be encouraged to set up their own businesses. ‘All the attributes we want from a gunnercooke partner will be instilled in our gunnerbloom lawyers,’ explains Cooke. Once gunnerbloom lawyers reach seven years’ PQE, they will move over to gunnercooke, taking their own client bases with them.

‘Our lawyers will get massive support at gunnerbloom,’ declares Cooke. ‘There are people at gunnercooke who started on low incomes as salaried lawyers, who have now moved into more entrepreneurial roles and their income has gone up five or six times. We have been quite successful in this, and now we want to share the experience of this with younger lawyers in gunnerbloom.’

It has been necessary to develop a tight infrastructure to support gunnercooke’s network of enterprises. A CEO and a finance director have been appointed, but Cooke is still the driving force behind the firm’s vision and strategy. ‘If you stop innovating, your competitors will pass you by. It’s as simple as that,’ he says. Cooke is currently working on new projects, and he involves the senior management team (SMT) as and when he needs to, ensuring that they understand what the priorities for the firm should be. He stresses that the SMT has complete autonomy when it comes to developing the business.

The future

gunnercooke began in Manchester, and is a well-established player in the local legal market. One of Cooke’s main challenges is establishing the gunnercooke brand in London. ‘Once we have made it work in London, we’ll take the brand overseas – maybe to seven or eight key centres, taking a boutique-style approach,’ explains Cooke. gunnercooke may also develop hubs around the UK where lawyers can work. ‘I don’t think people do their best work in the office anyway; my personal view is that traditional law firms go wrong by having people sit in the office seven hours a day, five days a week. We encourage our lawyers to do their work wherever they feel comfortable.’

What else does the future hold? ‘In terms of what the business has done so far, on a scale of one to 10, I think we are only at three. If we do almost nothing else from this point onwards, I still think we can grow into a 300-500 partner firm, simply because we get approached all the time by lawyers who are attracted to our working model.’ One of gunnercooke’s initial challenges was to get to 100 partners, Cooke reveals, because in its early days he saw the firm’s main competitors as the large regional law firms – the likes of Squire Sanders and Pinsent Masons with 100-300 partners – and his view was that gunnercooke had to occupy that same space.

‘When you launch a law firm from scratch, you either have to be different or the best. It’s hard to be the best when you first start, so you have to be different. I actually think it was easier for gunnercooke, as an outsider, to come into the market and challenge the fixed law firm business model, than it is for law firms to change themselves from within. I don’t think law firms have challenged themselves enough, to be honest.

‘gunnercooke has to continue to be different, but at the same time, challenge ourselves to be the best in client service. People can copy everything we do, but they cannot copy our culture.’