Q&A: Archie Tsirimokos – "We really understand our market"

In our latest Q&A, Meyer Vandenberg managing partner Archie Tsirimokos discusses the importance of holding partners to their promises, how to take on rising competition in the Canberra market and the key elements of his management philosophy.

You attended a course at Harvard Business School last year. What lessons did you take away?
“Fundamentally, it’s a reminder of the basics – alignment of the partner group, alignment of the firm and alignment of direction. The problem is that lawyers become lawyers because they want to be lawyers. You don’t go to law school and get taught how to run a business. But unless you think about the job like a business, you will fall behind. It’s very easy to fall back into the approach of ‘I just want to be a lawyer looking after client work’, but the business side of it – whether it’s the practice of the whole firm or whether it’s your own individual practice – is critical.”

As a managing partner, how do you ensure that lawyers – many of whom have a reputation for being strong-minded – adopt this culture of business development when they may prefer to focus on legal work?
“It’s about being true to the bigger picture. If you have plans around what you hope to achieve out of your firm and your practice, you have to set the parameters and then remind people about the things everyone has agreed to. Make sure you’ve got measures in place.
Performance can’t just be about financial considerations – it’s got to be a balanced scorecard approach. How are you going against your plan? How are you going with recruitment and developing your team? How are you going from a financial point of view? And how are you going in terms of the other things that you do for the firm, such as developing your precedents. It’s about taking a broader view of what your function is as a partner. (And as a managing partner) you have to make sure you check in regularly with partners to see that they are conscious of those considerations and be prepared in some cases to have the difficult conversations.”

Those conversations can be very difficult, no doubt.
“They can be, but if you’ve got context then it becomes a pretty straightforward conversation. If you keep going back to your agreements and remind partners that ‘this is the plan and you said you were going to do X, Y and Z and you’ve done none of those’. One of the consequences of those things not being achieved is that they’ve got to think about their performance and talk about it.”

Is part of that discussion reiterating to partners that they stand to benefit if everyone in the firm sticks to the plan?
“Yes. You’ve got to keep reminding partners of that fact. There’s a tendency in professional services to do what’s in front of you and think about today and the deadlines clients set. There’s not enough time taken to think about what the practice needs to look like next year and the year after that. That’s the real trick – trying to get people thinking about the longer-term view.”

Legal markets around the country are subject to new forces. What’s happening in Meyer Vandenberg’s home city, Canberra?
“The Canberra legal market is changing and two main things have happened in the past couple of years. Being in Canberra, the Federal Government is a potential client for most law firms. To be able to work for the Government, you have to be on the Legal Services Multi-User List. That list has opened up opportunities for a lot of firms, not just for those that were based here before, but also for those who have not been in Canberra before. So we’ve seen an influx of firms over the past three or four years, including the likes of Russell Kennedy and HWL Ebsworth. The list has given an opportunity for firms like ours that weren’t exposed to a lot of federal government work in the past to do some work in areas where we believe we have expertise. So that’s a change. Apart from the additional competition, I sense the Canberra market is quite different from others around the country. With the global financial crisis in 2008, Canberra didn’t see the impact for three or four years, but we always felt that it was going to come and eventually it did. But that was probably more around Tony Abbott’s pronouncements before the last election about what he was going to do to the Canberra public service. That put a dent in public confidence and it has continued to a point. But there are other considerations, too. For example, we do a lot of property work and there’s a whole lot of issues in relation to asbestos being found in some homes in Canberra – more than 1000 homes are affected. That’s had an impact on the property market. In summary, there’s a whole lot of different forces affecting firms, in addition to typical challenges such as staff and resourcing and accommodation needs.”

Given such competition from new firms targeting the Canberra market in general and federal government work, in particular, how will Meyer Vandenberg respond?
“If you are competing in the same space as all of those firms coming to town, which is largely to do federal government work, then the differentiator is perhaps the fact that we have a large team based in Canberra. We have a large firm with a lot of lawyers in Canberra, whereas other firms won’t necessarily have as many lawyers here. Then in the private market, it’s about saying we have the depth to be able to do some of the things that our competition aren’t able to do. So in a sense the key is to be able to change the way you relay that conversation about the firm’s strengths, depending on the audience.”

A couple of years ago, there was a sense that the multinationals firms were coming to Australia to take over. However, in more recent months there seems to be a sense that well-established, specialist firms with a strong state or city focus are well placed to thrive. What’s your view?
“Well that’s what we think our opportunity is. Yes, there is competition, but I’m not sure that we are competing in exactly the same space. This firm certainly looks very different to what it was five or 10 years ago, both in terms of its personnel and the type of work we do. And one thing we do know is that we really understand our market. I’m not sure if the new players coming into the market really get what makes Canberra tick. We have the upper hand in terms of being able to convince the market that we get what the market is about.”

As part of a strategy to stay city-based but broaden the firm’s networks, Meyer Vandenberg is a member of global legal network ALFA International, along with a range of Australian mid-sized firms around the country such as TressCox, Cornwall Stodart and Cowell Clarke. What benefits does this alliance deliver?
“The Australian firms know each other very well and the managing partners of those firms meet once every four months to discuss the big business issues we are facing. It’s a great forum to do that. The people within the group are fabulous. It also expands our networks internationally. We can honestly go to clients and say, ‘Look I’ve got a very good firm that I work with in Chicago and I can make the contact for you’. There’s an opportunity for us to be able to refer clients there and for them to refer clients to us. That’s also the case with the Australian firms. So we can have national reach even though we are based in one city. It’s a fantastic relationship and it adds a lot of value in terms of what we do.”

What are your biggest challenges on the management front?
“Law has changed and it is changing. You need to be much more nimble and open to new ideas and be able to change with the market. The way you go about digital, the commoditisation of services, the larger firms coming to Australia and the increased competition – so there’s a whole lot of things that need to be managed. You need to have a real focus on what you are about, and you need to have a focus on the way you go about it.”

How is the firm responding to the commoditisation of some legal services?
“That is quite a challenge. We do some work that you would regard as the commoditised work, but we don’t see that as being where we want to be long-term. We want to remain in the trusted-advisor space, but if we are going to do some areas of work because it ties in with what our clients do, we need to be able to do it well and efficiently and at a price that clients aren’t going to baulk at. We’re constantly looking at ways to do it better, and for us to be able to interact with clients better. So, for example, giving them an ability to log into a system which gives them an update on where they are at if they are sitting in their home office at night, and building systems around that flexibility for them.”

What are some factors that define your management philosophy?
“Keeping it simple. Trust – you’ve be got to trust people to do their jobs. Being prepared to live by some pretty fundamental principles about the way you do things. I’m talking about values – if you stick to those principles it kind of works itself out in the end. And people self-select. If you’ve got a very strong values-based organisation, people who don’t share those values end up working out that they’re not a good fit.”

Those core values the firm follows are respect, integrity, relationships, collaboration and excellence. How do ensure you follow through on them?
“By reminding partners and people about them. With a balanced scorecard approach, in terms of the way we measure partner performance, it includes the way partners either follow or don’t follow our values. If they don’t follow them, something has to be done about it. If you are consistent, then the message is always being relayed not just by me but by each of the partners within their teams.”

The firm also has a very big focus on people management, whether it’s internally or with clients. Tell us about that.
“Service industries are still about people. As part of our induction, every new staff member has an initial meeting with me – and that’s one of the messages that I keep getting across; it’s about people. If our people weren’t good, we wouldn’t have a business. We rely on the fact that our people are good and that they share our values and approach. Being able to continue to reinforce that position is critical.”

What are your hopes for the firm?
“In the long term, I hope that the firm continues to enhance its reputation as a leader in the industry sectors we are focused on – namely, in the property and construction, government, knowledge and education, and not-for profit sectors. Shorter term, I hope that we have a smooth transition to new premises in 2015. Our new offices (in the MTAA-owned ‘Ernst & Young’ building) will give us the opportunity to have all our staff on one level as the building has a floor plate of 2900 square metres. We expect that move will provide our staff and clients with a great new amenity to enable us achieve that long-term vision.”