Exploring the impact of geopolitics in law

Peter Jackson (00:03): Have you ever woken up in the early hours of the night and thought, what on earth am I going to do about this? If so, you’ve had a 3:00 AM conversation. I’m Peter Jackson and as the former CEO of international law firm, Hill Dickinson, I’ve been there too.

(00:21): This is the podcast that examines those moments in the cold light of day. And I like to do that because I think that once you understand that we all have 3:00 AM conversations, you can relax a little and start actually working out what to do about them instead.

(00:39): In this podcast, you’ll hear from high achievers about what’s kept them up at night, so you can learn from their experiences. In this episode, you’re going to hear from the award-winning editor of The Lawyer magazine, Cat Griffiths. Now The Lawyer is the preeminent trade magazine for the legal sector, but these days it’s so much, much more than that.

(01:03): It provides analysis and insights into trends, data, and real-time news. And it’s the place that the industry turns to first to get the information it needs. Against the backdrop of the steep decline in print media, Cat successfully transformed the business model for The Lawyer, taking it behind a digital paywall. You might not be surprised to hear that this time of dramatic change caused her a few 3:00 AM conversations of her own.

Catrin Griffiths (01:33): I think sometimes figuring out which path to take at what moment was definitely something that I thought about at 3:00 o’clock in the morning and at 4:00 o’clock and at 5:00 o’clock.

Peter Jackson (01:46): Cat got through that more than successfully, and you’ll hear how she did it coming up. But first, let me introduce you to my co-host for this episode, Sarah Emerson. Sarah is a specialist in dispute resolution and crisis management based in Hill Dickinson’s London office. What does your job actually entail you doing?

Sarah Emerson (02:08): Peter, it’s about supporting clients sometimes at difficult times, so when their business is involved in some form of dispute. I work with clients to find solutions as swiftly as possible to the challenges that they’re facing in their business. And some, where necessary, that can involve high court litigation or assisting them in arbitration.

Peter Jackson (02:33): Right. Okay. So what got you into the law in the first place?

Sarah Emerson (02:38): I did a politics degree at university and I realised that I very much enjoyed debating with my peers. And I felt that politics definitely wasn’t for me, but law, I could draw some parallels with the law. And hence why I think probably I ended up in more of a dispute resolution role than perhaps a transactional one. Dealing with crises, difficult challenges, and working through problems for clients felt really interesting and exciting to me as a young student.

Peter Jackson (03:12): Excellent. Well, I can well see the analogies between politics and the law. But in the conversation we’ve got today, obviously we’ve got one of the leading exponents of our industry and someone who’s got a complete oversight of both the law and the politics of the law. What were you most enjoying looking forward to finding out about her?

Sarah Emerson (03:32): I was actually really interested to hear what Cat had to say about the period of time when she was doing her studying, Peter. As well as her role at The Lawyer, and really what took her on that journey. I was interested to understand what had caused her to make that quite significant change to her working life and perhaps make her a personal decision to add another dimension to what was already a busy schedule.

Peter Jackson (04:06): And of course, that indeed is one of her 3:00 AM conversations as she talks to us about her decision to take some time out alongside her job to go back to academia and gain a further degree.

(04:19): Now, another of the conversations you’re going to hear with Cat is about the impact that President Trump is currently having on the legal profession in the United States. Now, in previous episodes, we haven’t spoken about a subject that’s quite so topical and quite so fast moving.

(04:37): And indeed, since our conversation with Cat, the attack on law firms has continued but has been rather overtaken on his agenda by the tariffs that we speak only briefly about in the conversation. And it’s likely that tariffs are to remain at the top of his agenda for some months to come.

(04:58): But I do think that Cat’s observations on his attack on the legal profession are fundamental and really important. They boil down to an attack on the rule of law, one of the most fundamental concepts that any society will live by. They also attack the current thinking on equality, diversity, and inclusion.

(05:21): And amount in effect to an attack on human rights because by weaponizing his administration against law firms, it effectively tries to prevent an individual from having the law firm have his or her choice when the chips are down. And that’s simply wrong. So let’s move on to the interview.

(05:47): So, Cat, editor of The Lawyer for some time now. Welcome to 3:00 AM Conversations.

Catrin Griffiths (05:52): Thank you very much, Peter. It’s delightful to be here.

Peter Jackson (05:54): Good, good, good. I’ve heard you on another law firm’s podcast. You said you’re very uncomfortable sitting on that side of the microphone and the table.

Catrin Griffiths (06:02): Still am. It doesn’t get easier. And I’m very un-media trained, so I’m the worst person, actually, maybe the best person to have on.

Peter Jackson (06:07): Yeah, well, join the club in terms of media training, but don’t worry we’re much more parky than Paxman. One for the kids there. But there you go.

(06:15): You gave us three really interesting subjects to talk about. Two, which have come from your past and one which is very, very topical for society generally, quite frankly, at the moment, never mind the legal sector. And I want to get to those quickly.

(06:30): But first of all, just to set a little bit of context about your background, do I detect a hint of Wales in the background?

Catrin Griffiths (06:38): When I speak English, I don’t sound Welsh. But when I speak-

Peter Jackson (06:42): No, I didn’t mean that.

Catrin Griffiths (06:43): But when I speak Welsh, my accent is Southwest Waelian sort of [inaudible 00:06:48] way.

Peter Jackson (06:46): Is that home?

Catrin Griffiths (06:47): Which is where my… Well, no, I’ve never lived there. I was brought up in suburbs of London and Kent and my parents and all of their family were Welsh speakers. So actually my Welsh is probably incredibly old-fashioned. And it’s the sort of, I can understand old people, but younger slangy Welsh I find quite difficult because my Welsh isn’t particularly current. But yeah, I can sing a few hymns, not now.

Peter Jackson (07:08): We may-

Catrin Griffiths (07:09): Not right now.

Peter Jackson (07:09): We’ll come to that later. You studied French. What attracted you to the legal sector?

Catrin Griffiths (07:16): If I’m honest, it was literally, do you remember back in the day? Older listeners will remember this. We used to have things called print newspapers and the battle of print newspapers. There used to be these things called job ads.

(07:27): And on Mondays The Guardian ran, it was the media and creative. There were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of job ads every Monday if you wanted to get in. Anything from PR, marketing, journalism, research, you name it, all the creative stuff was there.

(07:41): And I just applied for pretty much everything in that. Ended up getting a job at Legalease, which had just come out with Legal 500, to start their first directory of continental law firms. And because I was a French speaker and at that point my German was okay as well, it just felt like a way of being able to use languages.

(08:01): And I had no idea. If you’d had told me then that decades later I’d still be talking to lawyers, then I would’ve been quite surprised. But then I didn’t really have a very clear idea of where the career was going to go. I think some people have a very clear idea at the age of 20. I wasn’t one of those. I think finding something you enjoy and that you respond to is probably a bit more fun, I think.

Peter Jackson (08:22): Indeed.

Catrin Griffiths (08:23): It’s nice not to have a plan.

Peter Jackson (08:26): Sometimes. Sometimes you’re talking to an ex-CEO. Come on.

Catrin Griffiths (08:29): True, true, true. Yeah.

Peter Jackson (08:31): But you are still here. But that leads us nicely really into the first of the conversations you’ve had with yourself over your career in the early hours because you nearly might not have been. And when we were talking about the conversations last week, you explained to me that there came a time where you did fear that being engaged in the legal sector just wasn’t going to do it for the career to come. So put that in some context for me.

Catrin Griffiths (08:56): Yeah, I think there was, I look back at it, I don’t philosophise too much about this, but I think what it was was that, put it this way, the job was always fun and it was always engaging. And I’ve always had the best and it’s just been brilliant. So that was all fine. It was just on a personal level, I didn’t feel I was developing much.

(09:15): It was sort of I could do it. I was turning up and it was loads and loads of fun, but I wasn’t being stretched in a particular way. Being stretched came a lot later, by the way, professionally, which we’re going to talk about. So I just happened to wander into an open day at Birkbeck, a fantastic institution that you can study while you work and really strong English department. And I did a masters in Renaissance studies.

(09:41): And then for the next seven years I did a PhD on the writings of basically how narrative changes in times of crisis, with specific reference to the English Civil War. And looking at the way that narrative fiction changes really radically in that time with lots of different influences coming in, whether it’s science, military, philosophical. So I won’t talk any much more about the PhD, but it is probably available on request if anyone wants to read all about this amazing subject.

(10:09): But actually it is, I often think that times of crisis are very interesting moments to write about and to be in. Not that we would like it much right now. But I will give you one parallel, which was in the 1640s the news books came along and it was literally like the internet happening. And so mass print where everyone could see everything that was happening, everyone had huge opinions, and there were culture wars in the most extraordinary way.

Sarah Emerson (10:39): Talk to me a little bit more about making that change? And how you went through the decision to step away from your career and do something a bit different?

Catrin Griffiths (10:45): Yeah, I didn’t actually feel it was stepping away. I was doing it on top of my day job. And so I didn’t at any point stop work. And it was a time that coincided with the financial crisis. So funnily enough, work became… So I felt that there were ways of expanding what we were covering and actually asking different questions.

(11:03): At that point, we were just putting our toe in the water of data. So on that level it was much more about, some people may get this, there is something really pleasurable about spending time in a library. There’s the smell of a library and the idea that you’ve just got all of these books there that are sort of on the shelves. And there’s something physically quite pleasurable about that, it’s very hard to explain. You either know what I’m talking about or you don’t.

(11:27): And I just spent weekends doing it and really you sort of get sucked down unbelievably interesting rabbit holes. And I think that was a great way of keeping my mind occupied. It had really great side effects in the sense that I was much better at editing other people’s copy because of what my supervisor was doing to my copy.

(11:51): I won’t go into too detail there. But actually explaining to a junior person why this doesn’t work and why that argument doesn’t hang together, I suddenly acquired a language to be able to do it. And I didn’t go in to do my PhD in order to do that, but it was a weird side effect.

Sarah Emerson (12:07): And the juggle?

Catrin Griffiths (12:08): Well, at that point my daughters were slightly more free-range. So as teenagers, they didn’t really want mum around quite so much. So I was freed up on that level. If you are athletic and you train for a marathon or an ultra marathon, you juggle that.

(12:25): The title of this podcast is 3:00 AM Conversations. Your best ideas quite often come at that moment. And in the same idea, sometimes it’s when you are, in my case, was in a deep in a library in other cases when they’re on their 20th mile, that actually these ideas come. And I think it’s one of the terrible sort of developments in law at the moment is the idea that you’re doing 10, 12 hour days.

(12:47): It’s not just the exhaustion, it’s just the lack of creativity that you have within that and the ability to get your brain switched off and then back on. I think maybe something about the switching itself is helpful as well.

Peter Jackson (13:00): Yeah, I think it might be tied in as well to what we are also seeing. You’ve touched on it in a way. Work-life balance being more high profile and the balance being a little bit more towards life.

(13:12): Okay, well let’s move on to the second conversation. And when we were discussing this in advance, the sense I came away with was that it was all around the change in business model. When you moved more from the old paper, used to arrive in a little envelope on a Friday. Every lawyer in the firm got one. I won’t tell you where we put them, but we all did.

(13:35): And that was about the physical change to a digital platform. But also really when you started to become much more data-driven in some aspects of what you did. And when we discussed it, you were very, very clear in actually drawing a line about the value that data might have in addition to proper journalism or as opposed to proper journalism. Tell us a bit more about that.

Catrin Griffiths (13:59): So there are two things. I suppose first of all that move towards the paid for model, which is when your industry… Law has not had this, I mean it’s so funny hearing lawyers talk about, “Oh, my God, technology.” And again, you are basically the same business as you were 25 years ago. This is not a massive change. You’re essentially doing the same work and the processes haven’t changed hugely. They’re just quicker and more efficient.

(14:21): But with us, with the media generally, there has been a wholesale, people have always called it a burning platform. When the big internet revolution happened and everyone was going online, the whole idea was everything would be free and that somehow the money would follow. Well, that didn’t happen.

(14:36): When you are thinking about completely new territory and you don’t really have a playbook and you have any number of potential paths that you can take, option paralysis can be a problem. And I think sometimes figuring which path to take at what moment was definitely something that I thought about at 3:00 o’clock in the morning and at 4:00 o’clock and at 5:00 o’clock.

(15:02): And our model was, just to recap, it was indeed a weekly print. It was classic, this is so many papers like this. Weekly print funded by advertising. Loads and loads of jobs at the back and lots and lots of display advertising at the front. Plus we did some events.

(15:16): And the idea actually paying for The Lawyer was, I mean, nobody paid for anything. Over the course, it was clear that for a start, people’s habits were migrating online. So while you have to create an online audience, so there was this happening in the corner, the actual move to the platform, to a paid for platform, I think we were quite late adopting. But I think we were also very disciplined about how we adopted it.

(15:41): We went behind a paywall in 2016. We were slightly lucky that there was a certain vote in June that year. Where actually everyone, and if you look at data throughout the media, historic data, the spike of online usage in 2016 is quite remarkable. And that is because particularly in the UK, because of the Brexit vote, but also because of the American election and everyone turned to online for where they were getting.

(16:08): So the idea that you couldn’t go online was a nonsense. But also because we were providing something that was exclusive, it was an easier proposition. If you change your model, it means that you have to change your working habits quite a lot. And obviously in order to differentiate ourselves, so to come to the data point, we started gathering quite a lot of rudimentary data. We’d had always a heritage of our UK 200, so we had law firm financials. So we had all of that, and that was in our back pocket.

(16:39): And that became the basis of quite a lot of how we built out quite a lot of what we do now. So we have ridiculous metrics on all sorts of things, everything from partner promotions and floor space and all of this kind of stuff. And of course, what AI is helping us do in the next stage is super exciting.

(16:59): But the move to data, to go back to what you were hinting at, Peter, is it’s really interesting. In our industry over the last, I’d say it’s less so now, but certainly from the late teens to the early ’20s, particularly during the COVID time, you’d get a lot of consultants that would come in to help media companies change their business model. And they would always say, “You need the data.” And by the way, they were right because you do. But those consultants were not storytellers.

(17:27): They didn’t understand what a reader would want. They’d always think of them as some strange bot at the end that consumed something, as opposed to a reader that has emotions and that might respond specifically to certain types of stories. So for their eyes, data was the only thing that mattered rather than the story.

(17:46): And if you have a pile of data that’s essentially undifferentiated, and you can’t create a story out of it, then that data is inert, it is landfill. What is the point of it? It has to be a dialogue between data and stories. And quite often now, we will look at the bunch of data and we’ll say, “Let’s see how we can make a story out of that.” But equally we’ll have a conversation with a managing partner and that managing partner may say something just off the cuff. We go, “Oh, okay, let’s see if that translates into a data set.”

(18:19): They have to have a dialogue with each other. But essentially if you can’t tell a story, human beings are all about stories. They’re not about… So the idea, so I’ll give you another example, and the consultants love this, and I’ll happily stand on a stage and go head-to-head with a consultant and say, “This does not work.”

(18:38): The consultants will say, “What you need, what your audience need, all those lawyers out there, what they need is a tool, a data tool to help them do their job.” I’m going, “No, they don’t.” They won’t use the data tool because lawyers, if they like data, they wouldn’t be lawyers because they tend to like words. And many lawyers have to be forced into using a spreadsheet. And the idea that they can have a tool to play with as part of their day job is absurd.

(19:04): Now, there are lots of people in a law firm that will need that, absolutely. And they’ll need it for very specific reasons. But if you think that you’re going to engage an audience by saying, “Look at our tool,” then that’s ridiculous.

(19:16): You engage an audience by sometimes saying what they really think, but they dare not say. Sometimes by finding out something that someone else doesn’t want you to print. And sometimes by just having a different view and a fresh view or maybe a challenging view.

Peter Jackson (19:31): How quickly did your audience get very comfortable with being a digital media outlet?

Catrin Griffiths (19:37): I think it happens over time. To be honest, what we had to do, we had all of this stuff and we kept writing about this data. And we knew it’d be a long road to get people to read or rather to understand that that was where we were about. So all we had to do was keep repeating it all the time.

(19:55): And I look back at some of, actually it was still in print for that time because we moved to a monthly print for a while. And we would just say, “The Lawyer, which has loads of data.” We just did it all the time for about three years. And then after a while, people go, “Oh, yeah, you’ve got loads of data.” Because you just have to keep reminding people. The idea that you can say, “This is what we are now,” and not remind people is for the birds, to be honest.

Peter Jackson (20:15): It’s the old trick, isn’t it?

Catrin Griffiths (20:17): Exactly.

Peter Jackson (20:17): Communicate, communicate, communicate, and eventually it lands.

Catrin Griffiths (20:19): Exactly. You have to. Yeah.

Peter Jackson (20:21): Yeah. So you’ve talked there about the attitude of consumers, the market to the changes. But as a leader of a number of teams within your organisation, how did you lead them to the new world?

Catrin Griffiths (20:34): Journalists are a lot more conservative about change than you might imagine. And there’s also a sense, certainly when we were going behind a paywall, was journalists are also incredibly sensitive towards about commercial influence. And we’ve always kept a very strict dividing line between editorial and commercial.

(20:54): Funnily enough, what really moved the dial on this one, and it only occurred to me sort of partway through the process, and it definitely occurred to me later, the 3:00 AM or thereabouts, was that there was a commonality of interest of editorial and commercial at this point. Because what journalists really want is for their stuff to be read. And if it is the case that firms are signing up one by one, the journalists would be so happy because it was a validation of the fact that people were happy to pay for what they were reading.

(21:26): And I think finding that commonality of interest, it’s the same thing, but you’re expressing it in different ways. For the commercial people, it’s about bolstering a new business model. For the editorial, it’s about audience. And by the way, I really bang on about this internally, they are not customers, they are our audience. And that’s a very, very different view.

Peter Jackson (21:47): Let’s move on to number three because it’s much more today. And I better say we’re recording this in early April, and quite frankly, the speed at which it’s changing and happening is rather frightening.

(21:59): This is set in a legal context, but it’s probably relevant globally, and it’s keeping a lot of us awake at night, and it’s about President Trump. And this is not political. It’s not for us to decide who the Americans should have as their president. Of course it isn’t. But he’s one of the most powerful people on the globe, and how he behaves does affect all of us in society.

(22:21): And at the moment, what we are seeing is an attack on two fronts. And he’s attacking the rule of law, and he’s also attacking DEI, diversity, equality, and inclusion. And almost weaponizing those concepts as a mechanism for punishing his opponents, for want of a better expression. Is that what we’re seeing at the moment, do you think?

Catrin Griffiths (22:49): Yeah, I think that’s a fair summary. Yeah, I mean there’s a lot written about it, and as you say, I’m really aware that this is going to change. Here we are on a day where Willkie has just struck a deal.

Peter Jackson (23:02): Willkie being a significant American law firm.

Catrin Griffiths (23:02): A significant American law firm following in the footsteps of first Paul, Weiss and then Skadden who have struck similar kind of deals. I mean, essentially it’s extortion, I would say. It is a weird act of fealty by these firms.

(23:18): I think probably less so in the case of Paul, Weiss, who Brad Karp decided to go through a very long dark night of the soul to keep his firm going because of the worry that some of his partners might leave and go elsewhere. Some clients who are perhaps more MAGA adjacent, don’t care.

(23:36): So there is difficulties for a leader in that position. It is not easy. It’s very easy for some of us to say, “Well, you should be protesting about this and you should be up on the barricades, et cetera.” I don’t think any leader in that position wouldn’t want. You wouldn’t want to be, I wouldn’t want to be. It’s like impossible.

(23:56): However, it seems interesting to parse the moral paths that have been taken because not all firms have done that. And I think there is clearly going to be a divergence of the firms that are pulling the full lock to protect their financial position, and the firms that are not. And a lot of it comes down to whether your firm is largely litigation focused or not.

(24:17): So it’s not really about the financial per se, it’s more about your business mix. I think if you are a bunch of litigators, you are more likely, not necessarily from temperamental reasons, although who knows, perhaps you are more likely to say, “No, no, no, we can pursue this.” Whereas if you are, the firms that have more of a corporate and transactional basis are the ones that appear right now to be kneeling at the altar.

(24:42): So yeah, I mean it’s super concerning because a lot of people have, for whatever you think about United States of America, it has a set of values that are very, very clear. And it’s difficult to square those values with the idea that you can’t choose your own legal counsel because the president might. That is clearly, well, it is to an outsider, an offence against those values.

(25:08): So I think big lawyers are at a major crossroads here. My pessimistic sense is that it won’t matter. That big law will carry on and in a sense will not feel the repercussions because they’ll do the deal and they’ll carry on making money.

Peter Jackson (25:26): Let’s put this in context. What he’s doing is saying, “You, Mr. Law Firm, employee or employed.” I mean some of them are being attacked for historical employees they had. “You’re employing a lawyer who took me on in some way.” What he’s saying is, “Don’t stand up to me. It doesn’t matter whether you’re big law or anything else. If you disagree with me and I don’t like it, then there’s likely to be consequences.”

(25:56): And whether that’s right or wrong, he’s the leader of the western world, whatever. That is not a concept that we’ve seen in the western world in recent times, let’s put it that way. And I have a feeling that actually that is going to be felt to be relevant in other sectors.

(26:12): It may be relevant as to how people do business with the United States of America, if tariffs make it worthwhile doing business with the United States. Because if they get something wrong in the manner in which they do business, are we then going to be prosecuted? Are we then going to have executive orders against us?

Catrin Griffiths (26:33): I think you’re absolutely right. And I agree with you that it makes the United States a much more unpredictable place to do business. I think it will still have this gravitational force because of the capital markets and the financing.

(26:43): I wonder what the trickle-down effect is going to be on that. If businesses have a choice not to transact under. Or let’s say new law, would they move hopefully to English law?

Peter Jackson (26:56): Well, yes, that’s waving the flag. That’s an interesting point, isn’t it? If a business can’t rely on the US courts to protect them in the event of an administration that rides a bit roughshod from time to time, then that really does lessen perhaps the willingness to do business there, doesn’t it?

Catrin Griffiths (27:15): Yeah, I agree. And I think there is a sort of a reason for American exceptionalism. And I think the vibrancy of the legal system is one of them actually. I mean unfortunately, I’m being pessimistic here on a political basis. The strongman president is very attractive for a lot of voters.

(27:33): And we’ve seen with polls in Europe, had the attraction of not necessarily Orban, but well, I would include Orban here. But the idea of a strongman president or leader is attractive to lots of people and actually to lots of young people as well. So it’s not just old boomers that are harking back to kind of Stalinist times on the continent at all. And there has always been a political discourse, which is about the courts are getting in the way of us doing our business and making lives better for you, our citizens and our voters.

(28:04): And that’s a very difficult argument to shift because the tabloid press are very good at finding outside cases of what appears to be weird judgments, particularly on asylum seekers. They can’t go back because they don’t like chicken nuggets or something. All of those stories, which I mean fair play, that is a good story and you would want to know a little bit more about it.

(28:26): But unfortunately, that’s the stuff that is, that’s what people remember. It goes back to what I was saying right at the beginning of this podcast, is that you can give people all the data and all the information they want, but if you don’t have a story, then you have not a cat in hell’s chance of moving the dial on any political argument that you want to make.

Sarah Emerson (28:44): And on that story point, The Lawyer’s written a lot recently about the US firms and the rise of them in the London market. I’d be interested to know whether you think the recent developments with Trump might impact what we’ve seen by way of an ongoing and increasing presence of both?

Catrin Griffiths (29:01): Yeah, I think they might. I think the biggest US firms in London, the most profitable ones, exist in a very particular sphere where they’re working for private capital that want these particular deals done. And going back to what we were talking about, if private capital thinks actually things are getting a little bit shonky over there and I’m not sure that the agreements that we are making, the agreements are making look a little bit more vulnerable, then there might be some change within that.

(29:30): But I don’t think it’s the case. I think that is a set of economics that’s so wildly different from what we’re talking about here. This is about huge deals, huge amounts of money, unbelievable compensation. The Magic Circle is part of this ecosystem. I think whether or not Paul Weiss or Skadden Kowtow to Trump will have very little direct effect on how they do business here. I just don’t see it. I’ve been speaking to GCs at private equity houses and for them it’s just like, “Well, yeah, I’m reading the news and whatever, but I just need to get this deal done.”

(30:11): We are all in news avoid. Since 2016, a lot of us have been news avoiders. You’ve seen many, many listeners from radio drop because people just go, “I just don’t want to hear what’s going on because everything is bad in the world.” And I think quite a lot of GCs might be in that position as well to bring it back to what you were asking.

(30:30): So I don’t think there is client pressure at all. If there was client share pressure, that would change. But I think we’re entering a world where every law firm’s clients are going to have a tough time anyway. So it’s unfortunately, I think the answer is. And it would be lovely for there to be some kind of karmic outcome from this, but I’m really not sure.

Peter Jackson (30:57): The economic juggernaut is going to roll along.

Catrin Griffiths (30:58): I think it might.

Peter Jackson (31:01): One thing we have seen is in response to attacks in the States, a number of American law firms with offices in the UK or without, changing the way they represent their human policies, their DEI policies, both internally and to the public. By removing references that clearly the Trump administration doesn’t like. And removing roles that the Trump administration doesn’t like.

(31:30): Are you seeing any firms in the UK or indeed in Europe that aren’t linked either financially, contractually with American firms taking any similar steps at the moment in fear?

Catrin Griffiths (31:45): No, not at all.

Peter Jackson (31:45): No, no.

Catrin Griffiths (31:46): We held a dinner for managing partners recently, and these were very large firms, but not in the Magic Circle. And some of them had US offices and some didn’t. I mean, everyone’s freaked by it because sort of the overreach, the extraterritorial kind of arm, who knows what could happen.

(32:07): There’s a lot of talk about, amongst them, about we’re going to stick to our values, which is great. I think it’s actually more important that they stick together and they have a collective response. Because what happened on Wall Street? There was no collective response.

(32:19): What the practical effect is of these attacks are more important I think, than what you call DEI. If you start calling it inclusion, you might even start calling it variety or you might call about human stuff. Who cares? The point is, are you treating people equally? Is your recruitment process fair?

Peter Jackson (32:37): It’s how you behave, isn’t it?

Catrin Griffiths (32:38): It’s how you behave.

Peter Jackson (32:38): And how it manifests itself.

Catrin Griffiths (32:40): Absolutely. Absolutely. So I think we need to be careful about what we say about that. There will be schemes. I don’t think UK firms are going to stop doing outreach. I don’t think UK firms are going to stop trying to treat their staff with respect and take account of perhaps people’s individual backgrounds and their journeys towards the law. Why should they?

(33:00): The question is whether they go out and they say, “This is a positive value and come to us because we are doing this.” And I think that they probably won’t because that means putting their heads over the parapet. And that’s the issue. For the moment for UK firms it’s let’s hope this hurricane passes. Let’s just hope. Yeah.

Peter Jackson (33:23): The danger of course is that the political observers pre November ‘24 were saying, “Well, don’t judge Trump on what he says. Judge him on what he does.” And unfortunately he’s doing at the moment rather than saying. And as you say, let’s hope it passes and calms down. But it is a daily lottery, quite frankly, as to what happens.

Catrin Griffiths (33:51): And there’s also an issue, he said last week that he would very much like to stand for a third term.

Peter Jackson (33:57): He did.

Catrin Griffiths (33:59): So that is something where the law will be, in an ideal world, big law would band together and say, “This and no further. This is genuinely unconstitutional. You cannot do this.” So there are even bigger battles that are going to happen, I think.

Peter Jackson (34:14): Yeah. Well, that rather gloomed me out.

Catrin Griffiths (34:14): Yeah, sorry about that.

Peter Jackson (34:20): Before we wrap up, a couple of questions. Tell me more about your love for music because that comes across.

Catrin Griffiths (34:26): Oh, yeah. Well, I’m in two choirs, which is another fantastic way of… Because of course, even you are in a choir, you can’t be on your phone, you have to listen to other people. You’re thinking about a sort of collective sound. It’s just beautiful. And then you go to the pub afterwards. So what is not to like?

(34:46): And of course choirs I think are for all people, whatever your standard of singing. Because you could join a local community choir and have the best time, or you could join a chamber choir and sing incredibly niche music and have the best time. But it is, if I could prescribe anything, that would be a really cheap antidote on the NHS, I think. Join a choir. That was a terrible answer. Sorry.

Peter Jackson (35:10): No, that was an excellent answer. That was an excellent answer. If you can get the NHS to prescribe that, good on you. And then the final question I do ask all of my guests. Mr. Spielberg suddenly gets a liking for the legal sector and journalism in the legal sector and decides to direct The Lawyer the movie. Who’s going to play the editor?

Catrin Griffiths (35:33): This is a really crap and horrible question, and I don’t like answering questions.

Peter Jackson (35:38): That’s why I ask it.

Catrin Griffiths (35:38): Okay, I say so. It’s much easier to cast things now because they are gender blind or colour-blind or anything like that. So I don’t necessarily have to pick a woman to play me. So I’m going to pick Michael Sheen simply because obviously he’s Welsh. I just think he stirs the soul.

(36:01): Not because I can stir people’s souls, but I just would love someone to play me and sound like he’s on the barricades and there’s a fabulous wind in his hair, and that would be a lot of fun. So I think if it was a heroic action movie, I would hope a gender swapped Michael Sheen would do it.

Peter Jackson (36:23): That may have been a crap question, but that’s a fantastic answer. That’s the best answer we’ve had. You definitely win the Christmas raffle prize with that one.

(36:32): Cat, time’s against us. I know you’re a busy lady, so thank you so much for coming in today. Thank you for your honesty, your openness, ability to be a little controversial maybe at one moment, so we’re not cutting those out. But seriously, thank you very much indeed, Cat.

Catrin Griffiths (36:47): Thank you. It’s been great.

Peter Jackson (36:47): Great to see you.

Catrin Griffiths (36:47): Thank you both.

Peter Jackson (36:56): Okay, Sarah, so we just finished with Cat Griffiths. What are your immediate takeaways? What struck you?

Sarah Emerson (37:02): Really interested to hear Cat’s explanation of what she did during the time of change in her business. And how she led her team through a really significant period of change, including those in generations that were different from her. I’d be interested to know, Peter, there’s some parallels here. Cat has taken her business through periods of change and you’ve done the same.

Peter Jackson (37:26): Yeah, there were parallels. And those periods certainly lead to conversations at 3:00, 4:00, and 5:00 o’clock in the morning as Cat said. But I think as the leader, there’s a process, in my experience. First of all, it’s satisfying yourself that change is necessary and understanding why.

(37:45): Because change is disruptive, it can be damaging, it’s costly. It may involve processes that will be financially negative. And I think the first thing is to get yourself as the leader in the place where you think actually we’ve got to do this and there’s very good reasons for do this and I can sell this.

(38:05): Secondly, you’ve got to get a consensus around you from the influences in the business, perhaps the constitutional decision makers in the business. In the case of a law firm partnership like ours, Sarah, it’s the board, it’s the executive, and then it’s the shareholders, the members.

(38:23): And that can involve a number of techniques from persuasion, explanation, living examples, et cetera, et cetera. Sometimes the consultants, the commentators, the observers will say, “You need to build a burning platform.” And when they say that, what they mean is, if we don’t do this change, look, the whole platform around us is burning, we’re going to drown.

(38:47): I don’t think necessarily you have to be that dramatic all of the time. I think if you can approach the change with logic, devise clear explanations of why the logic is there, and also in any business, it’s not just about lawyers. In any business, you can demonstrate the financial advantages or the avoidance of disadvantages that the change will bring around. Then that should drive you to the right place.

(39:16): There is a process to do this. But at the end of the day, and Cat said, “It’s all about people.” You’ve got to persuade the people that there is a reason to change and that they can change and that isn’t going to disrupt their lives. And nobody likes change. So whilst I can say there’s a process, I wouldn’t for a minute suggest it’s easy.

Sarah Emerson (39:38): And something else that Cat said, I’ve been giving some thought to. We talked about ED and I, in particular. What about for us? That held a concern now as a law firm?

Peter Jackson (39:48): Yeah, a positive attitude towards diversity, equality, inclusion is, in quotes, the right thing to do these days. That’s the way society, certainly in Europe, in the UK, maybe it is under attack in the USA, is believed to be the right way to behave. But I don’t think anyone would accuse me of being happy clappy for the sake of being the right way to behave.

(40:12): It’s a commercial imperative because we historically have lost the opportunity to develop vast swathes of the talent pool. And I say we, I’m talking as a 64-year-old nearly, leader of a law firm about the law and professional service firms generally.

(40:32): We’ve put glass ceilings in for women on a gender basis. We’ve not pursued parts of society to provide access to a legal careers as we should have done. And in some cases, as a profession, we’ve not treated people equally.

Sarah Emerson (40:46): So what do we do next, Peter, as an industry?

Peter Jackson (40:49): Well, as an industry, I think what we do next is to continue doing what we started, perhaps some would say too late, and I would have difficulty arguing with that. And I don’t think it’s about how we portray ourselves on websites and all of this very overt manifestation of equality issues. It’s about how we behave.

(41:09): And I think we’ve got to make sure that there are no glass ceilings. That we do put in place policies, procedures, structures that enable any lawyer regardless of gender, colour, creed, background, whatever, to have an opportunity to develop themselves as far as they want to go.

(41:30): If a woman or indeed man wants to pack in at the age of 30 and have kids and that’s it, happy days for them, no problem. And if they want to come back 10 years later, 20 years later, if we can make it work on both sides, we should ensure that we’ve got structures that enable that to happen.

(41:49): We should be going into schools that previously would never have thought of advising its pupils to think about a career in law. And saying, “Actually, you don’t have to go to university anymore to become a qualified lawyer. There are other routes to it. You can start at 16. You don’t have to land yourself in massive amounts of debt that quite frankly you’re not going to be able to afford.”

(42:12): “You can actually come to us at 16. We will train you. If you’re still with us, because your mindsets will change. By the time you’re 18, by the time you’ve got through the five years that you might have to do. But if you’re still there at 21, there’s a career for you.”

Sarah Emerson (42:30): And we’re proud of that, aren’t we?

Peter Jackson (42:30): We’re very proud.

Sarah Emerson (42:30): Our apprenticeship scheme is fantastic.

Peter Jackson (42:32): Absolutely. We were one of the forerunners of the apprenticeship scheme in the UK, and we linked up with Manchester Met 10, 15 years ago to do this. And that’s what we do. That’s not changing what we at Hill Dickinson have done.

(42:44): This is not about how you portray yourself. This is about how you behave. And what we’ve got to do, I think, is to continue to behave in that way. And that’s a commercial imperative, I’ll say anyway. We’re daft not to, quite frankly.

Sarah Emerson (42:57): We talked to Cat about the current geopolitical landscape. Peter, as your time as a leader of a law firm, did you experience any significant geopolitical events or changes that impacted the way that you led the business?

Peter Jackson (43:12): Yeah, I think there’s a couple of obvious ones from recent history, which are geopolitical events in terms of how they were handled. First is Brexit, that obvious one. And that’s caused an incredible amount of uncertainty in June 2016 for a period of time.

(43:34): And of course, the one thing that any leader hates, anybody, any human being hates, but particularly leaders, is uncertainty. We love to know what tomorrow looks like. We hate it when we don’t know what the next phone call is going to be, which of course is all the time.

(43:47): But with Brexit, and you may remember, there was that hiatus period of about two to three weeks where nobody knew what was going to happen. And we lost millions of pounds in that period, or everybody, well, the business did. This wasn’t just about us, of course it wasn’t. But we could identify deals that we were involved for one side or another with fees agreed, et cetera, et cetera. That just stopped.

(44:15): And it was millions of pounds in that two-week period before, I think it was the CEO of Dixons, wasn’t it? Wrote a leader piece in the time saying, “The government isn’t going to sort this out, guys, we’re on our own. If this is down to business to carry on, get on with life and make sure this isn’t an absolute catastrophe.” And it changed very quickly after that.

Sarah Emerson (44:36): I remember.

Peter Jackson (44:37): But in that period, all of the concepts that are associated with a loss of income came into play. When are we making redundancies? We’ll have to stop spending that. And they’re very proper, understandable reactions that leaders hate. And I was fighting a rearguard action even at that stage saying, “No, let’s just calm down. Let’s see how this plays out.”

(45:01): Because we don’t like making redundancies. We don’t like cutting expenditure we’ve already agreed we’re going to make. So Brexit was a very obvious one.

(45:10): The second one, again, incredibly obvious, was the pandemic. But the sort of politics around that were more about how the government’s here and around the world dictated that work should be carried out. And in particular, for example, lockdown. And also the uncertainty around how long this was going to last.

(45:37): We were fortunate in that were several of us in my management team and on our board that had managed through recessions. So we had seen this before in a certain context, but lots of people hadn’t. We were in the throes of the annual budget at the time. And we stopped and I said, “We can’t budget because we have no idea what this looks like.”

(46:01): Speaking to some of my partners after the event, there were a number of them who just assumed we would have to close the business full stop. And that the business world would stop, and we were just all going to be poorer, and that was just life. We could accept that because the alternatives that we were seeing in the media every day was far worse, quite frankly.

(46:22): Now, none of that panned out to be the case as it turned out. And in fact, the opposite was quite true. And the pandemic period, feared to be a disaster for professional service firms, became a period of unbridled, increased profitability. Because businesses, again, the private sector usually comes to the fore, doesn’t it? In any geopolitical event is I suppose the theme here. Businesses very quickly came to the event, “Well, yeah, okay, we’re in a national disaster, but that doesn’t stop the fact that I want to buy that business.”

(46:58): That doesn’t stop the fact that I’ve got employees to look after. That doesn’t stop the fact that I’ve got nothing else to do. So why don’t I get on with business? I can’t go to the pub, can’t go to the football. Let’s crack on. There was loads of cash in the market and that has to be spent.

(47:13): So the deals that the business community was saying, “Well, I want to carry on and try and do,” could be funded. And so actually what was a disaster, don’t take any of this the wrong way, it was an horrific period for the world, wasn’t it? But actually in terms leadership of a law firm from a financial perspective, there was nothing to worry about.

(47:34): The worry became the people and literally keeping them alive. In the sense, not of them being affected by COVID, but the mental health issues associated with not being in an office. Most human beings are social in that sense.

Sarah Emerson (47:54): Well, as time ticked on, how you develop people well.

Peter Jackson (47:57): It became generational because of course there were people that coming into the business who didn’t interact with their colleagues for months and months and months. So there’s a couple of examples where the geopolitical landscape dominated how we acted as a business.

(48:17): So many thanks to Cat Griffiths for that very interesting conversation. Thanks to my co-host, Sarah, and thanks to you for listening to this episode of 3:00 AM Conversations. You’ll hear from us again in about a month’s time.

(48:31): And in the meantime, please don’t forget to rate, review, and follow the podcast, and that way you’ll be able to spread the word. And if you’d like to find out more about how Hill Dickinson may be able to help you, then head to hilldickinson.com. See you soon.