Fox Hayes
No of Partners: 22
No of Assistant Solicitors: 10
Other Fee-earners: 73
www.foxhayes.co.uk
Fox Hayes is a small firm with big plans. The 30-lawyer Roundhay-based firm has recently signed the lease on a 30,000 sq ft office space in Leeds’ city centre which it will move into late 2005. With the upgrading of its address, the firm hopes, will come a similar improvement in its profile, profits and client-base.
The firm’s growth has already been exponential in recent years. It claims to have grown its turnover by 750% since 1995 and plans to double this again to £10m by 2007. It currently has 160 staff in total and its new premises will make room for 220.
“In football terms - we’re not Premiership - we’re about seventh in division one at the moment, and we want to be in the top three of division one” says managing partner, Philip Drazen.
This spurt in growth has followed the appointment of Drazen, a former commodities trader, as managing partner in 2001. The firm has concentrated on developing an entrepreneurial client-base. In 2000, the firm created the Fox Hayes Entrepreneurs Club which seeks to introduce investors to entrepreneurs.
Many of the firm’s practice areas are structured around the commercial needs of its clientele, although it also has personal injury, private client and matrimonial practices and describes its commercial property department as one of its strongest.
The firm also has some bigger name clients such as Sainsbury’s and Rolls-Royce and has developed some interesting niches, not least its NASDAQ flotations practice headed by partner Robert Manning. This practice deals with property in France and has a specialism in advising the toy, gift and nursery industries on their regulatory obligations. The firm is also set to launch an urban regeneration practice following the recruitment of partner Simon Hedley from Halliwell Landau.
The concentration of resources into these niches is a deliberate policy, Drazen says, to enable the firm to gain a greater profile in specific areas than its size might suggest.
The firm is as entrepreneurial as its client base and is also investing in IT-based legal services such as its e-conveyancing arm. Yet, despite its ambitions, the firm insists it wants to retain some of the benefits of a small practice. “We make sure that they get the work-life balance right” the firm says. “There’s no room for the big firm mentality of slogging away in the office forever just to get Brownie points.”
To reach its £10m target, Fox Hayes has committed itself to a growth rate of 35-40% per year and, at senior level, the firm has appointed head-hunters to locate lawyers with the ability to bring a following with them. At more junior levels, the watchword is “Personality”. “You don’t have to have gone through the usual process of university and a big firm training contract” says Drazen. “If you are a bit more mature and have lived life, that’s more interesting to us.”
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