Launching a specialist firm is a milestone career moment. It’s common to think that taking such a step must require insatiable entrepreneurial drive or an incredible ‘disruptor’ idea. In truth, every founder’s journey is unique, but there is a common thread regarding the new law firms that Kindleworth has helped launch over the years.
New launches are led by experienced partners who have already built a thriving business, support sophisticated clients who love them, know how to win new ones, and have successfully recruited and developed their trusted fee-earning teams over many years.
Those that launch their own firms are seasoned equity partners who continue their previous practice under a new banner – iterating on what was already a proven approach. They move from an institutional platform to a fresh, modern one based on the founding team’s vision.
Yet, given the success rate of new specialist firms in recent years, why is there still such a high perceived risk associated with launching one’s own firm?
In this article, we share three of the key areas where perception doesn’t always match the reality.
#1: Clients won’t leave the ‘brand’ I’m working for now.
From working with a significant number of founders over the past 14 years, one thing is abundantly clear: experienced partners have an instinctive sense of the level of support they will receive from existing clients when setting up their own shop.
Some soft-test their plans with clients to gauge their reaction, and find that in many cases, clients themselves are frustrated with the one-size-fits-all parameters that are commonplace within the BigLaw environment. In fact, we have seen clients asking partners why they have yet to do their own thing. A founder partner’s desire to address those concerns is, of course, a core driver for launching a firm – and early client reactions to this alternative can be hugely positive.
As part of Kindleworth’s launch support, one of the first tasks we undertake is a strategic and financial planning exercise. As part of this exercise, we will forecast the revenues that you think will port and sense-check those with you. This helps explore and validate the scenarios in which clients or matters may or may not follow, at least not immediately, and devise plans for such scenarios. That planning is critical, not least for identifying cash requirements, but in reality, most clients do follow, and are eager to do so.
Yes, clients will want assurances about a new firm’s capability, stability and capacity – but these concerns are predictable and manageable. A professional back office provided by Kindleworth can be a core part of that narrative too.
This is our advice: have confidence in your instinct. If you think that a significant percentage of your clients will remain with you once you have launched, then from our experience that instinct is likely to be a fair reflection of the real outcome.
#2: You need rampant entrepreneurialism to found a law firm.
The teams that spin their practice out and launch a new firm don’t need to reinvent the legal sector. Most new entrant specialist firms have a distinct edge on their BigLaw competition: they do familiar things better; they can more demonstrably put their clients at the core of their service offering and have the freedom and agility to tailor their services to those needs, to make decisions faster, and to align commercial interests better than their BigLaw competition.
Launching your own firm is a hugely personal endeavour, with highly individual motivations behind it. Some founder teams are clear from the very outset that their ambition is to build a legacy firm, to become recognised as a leading player in the market with multi-jurisdictional presence that’s built to scale. Others simply seek the freedom to work with the clients they want, in the manner they choose and retain more of the value they create based on years of practice.
So, whilst launching your own firm certainly requires a vision and entrepreneurial spirit combined with courage, careful planning and thought, the requirement to be overtly or stereotypically ‘entrepreneurial’ is not a pre-requisite to becoming a law firm founder.
#3: Founding a firm will mean I have less time for my clients.
When considering a launch, the partners we speak to are supremely confident in their ability to deliver excellence to their clients – something they have been doing for decades already. They are often frustrated with systemic barriers within BigLaw that prevent them from delivering to their clients in the way they want. They want to spend more time, not less, with clients and they’re understandably concerned that launching their own firm will create even more ‘management’ for them.
Firstly, some good news: Most founders are in it because they love the legal work, and the opportunity and ability to spend more time doing it (as opposed to spending time in endless committee meetings) is a major win of launching their own firm.
Secondly, more good news: while it’s true that post-launch there is a business to run, Kindleworth supports founder teams pre- and post-launch with guidance on all the management decisions you will encounter and support on the delivery of your day-to-day finance, risk, HR, technology and marketing functions. We run the business and help guide our clients in its growth, so they can enjoy winning new mandates, engaging with clients and delivering first-class advice.
Is it time to explore spinning your practice out and launching your own firm?
The founding teams of firms Kindleworth has helped launch were confident in their ability to leverage the exceptional reputations and loyal client followings they had already built as the cornerstone of a new specialist firm of their own design.
In addition, by being liberated and becoming true owners, they used launching a firm as the springboard to achieve even more for their clients, and for themselves.
If you’re curious about what launching your own firm could look like, we’d be delighted to have that ‘what if’ conversation with you.
