Q&A: Simon Creek – "I always try to treat every member of the firm as I would like to be treated"

In our latest Q&A, HHG Legal Group managing director Simon Creek discusses why his firm chooses its clients carefully, the importance of business development and the joy of fast cars.

HHG has been around since 1919, starting as Hudson Henning & Goodman and forging a strong reputation as a regional practice in Albany before you and Murray Thornhill took over the firm in 2003 and led its transition to an incorporated legal practice in 2007. How does that background influence the culture and running of the firm?
“That history has certainly added flavour to the current culture. If you start off in a regional city, one of the things you learn is that you can’t get away with the same attitudes that you can do sometimes in the city. When you walk out of the office door or into any coffee shop or restaurant in town, you’re more than likely going to meet a client or someone on the other side. It was great training for us in the early days in terms of service standards and our standing in the community generally. We needed to be even better because we had that immediate accountability. The last thing you’d ever want to do in that forum is be embarrassed because you hadn’t returned someone’s phone call. They’ll quickly remind you – in public.”

The firm won service-based awards within a couple of years of entering the Perth market. What is good service in a law firm context?
“For me it starts with choosing your clients. The levels of service and commitment that we need to give to clients today are so far ahead of where they have traditionally been that we can’t afford to offer that to the wrong people. In other words, they have to be your target client. They have to be reasonable people who understand fair expectations of a good law firm. So it’s got to be a good deal for you as well. If you are going to offer incredible service levels right through from 24-hour availability, from regular coffees and meetings with the managing director that aren’t charged, through to a satisfaction guarantee, then you can’t afford to offer those to people who are going to be less than a good client for you. You have to filter them out in a diplomatic and ethical way. Otherwise you end up throwing pearls before swine, as the good book would say. Once you know that your client intake services are really good, you just throw yourself into it unreservedly. Whatever the client wants, and whatever level of customisation that they might require, you should almost be unreservedly delivering that.”

HHG is unusual in that it only has two owners, even though you have about 50 staff. How does that work?
“It’s a flat hierarchy in that we don’t attach any special privileges to ourselves apart from actual ownership. The doors are always open, there is a leadership team that involves non-equity players – it’s all about making not only clients but staff very at ease no matter what their background is in our culture.”

What’s your management style?
“I can tell you what my aspiration is – it’s for others to judge if I get there. I always try to treat every member of the firm as I would like to be treated if I were in their shoes. I have high expectations of people, so I assume that they have high expectations of me. And I spend every minute that I’m at work trying to meet those expectations. Then you’ve got a core philosophy that spans every element of the employee’s engagement with the firm. If at every stage, no matter what decision you’ve got to make, whether it’s about billing targets or whether to give someone leave when they haven’t got quite that much accrued, whether it’s salary review time, if you’re always looking at it trying to stand in their shoes and asking yourself ‘how would I want to be treated?’, I find that things get a lot simpler.”

You attended the World Masters of Law Firm Management conference earlier this year in Sydney, where Professor Ashish Nanda delivered a master-class. What lessons did you take away from the session?
“To me, the key message was the importance of not letting the massive rainmakers in a firm dictate culture. That went to the core of not only his advice on remuneration for senior practitioners, but also to the core of what we’ve tried to maintain in building our culture at HHG. It’s a fine line between encouraging the very best people to join the firm and stay with the firm, but at the same time training them to understand that it’s about the people and the culture – not just about massive billings. They’ve got to be the whole package.”

HHG has recently been listed as the No. 3 law firm in Australia, as ranked by the Top 50 Law Firms website. That must be gratifying.
“Yes, it’s been a nice pat on the back for the directors, but far more importantly it’s been great for morale, great for culture – and it’s been useful in recruitment.”

Apart from your legal background, you have a strong background in business, having current or former advisory involvement in groups such as the Bendigo Bank, the Albany Chamber of Commerce & Industry and Jumpstartz. How significant has that experience been for your management work at HHG?
“At the risk of blowing my own trumpet, I have to say that’s the thing I’m most grateful for. It’s given me an edge in my career at large and it certainly helps me run and drive HHG today. The legal profession is the industry group that’s been the least innovative over the past 50 years. The beauty of that for a firm like HHG is that when you are innovative and you do determine to do things differently, you get noticed for it – and you get noticed quite quickly.”

What are some of the key innovations at your firm?
“Sometimes I feel a bit guilty because some of what we are adopting is not actually that radical at all outside the law. Take the satisfaction guarantee: one of our advertising lines for that is simply ‘Money back guarantees aren’t new. For lawyers they are.’ So you get a combination of benefits whereby we can say, ‘yes, we are aware that the profession is a bit slow, but we are different’.”

The firm has also introduced HHG Essentials, a range of online, fixed-fee services around documentation for things such as wills, small business and family law. What led to this move?
“It’s our first foray into online delivery of legal services in a category of the market for which HHG would normally be overkill. It’s not a price-point offering – it’s a simplicity versus complexity offering. We’ve identified that, in wanting to be innovative for the future and embracing the delivery of services online, the markets that seem to be neglected are the young entrepreneurs , the young families, tomorrow’s higher-income earners who need incubating today. We are using technology to offer quality solutions for simple cases.”

So you are trying to move quickly in a market where non-traditional legal service providers are seeking to carve out a niche?
“Exactly. I mean there are lots of new online document generation businesses in Australia that are wholly online legal businesses, but what we are not seeing is this combination of what the Americans call ‘click and mortar’. HHG is all about click and mortar – this combination of a traditional legal firm with a full-service offering, as well as the online offering for the simpler cases where people just don’t need the same resources.”

How difficult is it to roll out both those diverse service lines?
“It’s all a question of process. Process has to underline anything like that because otherwise you could end up doing the simpler, lower-cost work with the same overheads as the rest of the firm. Obviously you can’t afford for that to happen.”

You have built a very strong brand in Perth in less than a decade. How did you achieve that on the marketing front?
“It’s a combination of advertising, PR, strategic communications, using social media in marketing, right through to our very high-touch business development culture. What I mean by that is four years ago we decided we wanted a business development culture at HHG. We could see that the directors were bringing in most of the work and, given that there are only two owners, we knew that this was not sustainable. So we set about strategically introducing every single employee in the firm to basic business development training. For all our lawyers now, in addition to their normal KPIs, they also have a business development KPI. It doesn’t matter if they are a clerk through to a junior lawyer through to an associate director; they have to fill in a monthly electronic timesheet and it reports back on all of their different business development activities over the last month.”

Have they embraced it?
“There is a lot of energy in the younger generation to learn about business development. That’s a big generational change. The younger lawyers want to know how to build their own profile; they want to know what business development really does mean. Yes, we have probably lost one or two lawyers over time because their willingness to involve themselves in this did not coincide with our demands. But it’s not an onerous expectation: it just asks them to report back on coffees with leads; how many of them called clients just to say hello; who was invited to marketing events. It’s not as if they’ve got to go out and bring in clients. It’s about teaching them that business development is part of client service.”

Many firms are considering their market positioning given the entry of multinationals into Australia and the rise of boutique firms. Where does HHG sit?
“We will always stay an independent Western Australian firm, but I can see us with strong allegiances in every other capital city. If it ever went beyond that it would only be because it was a no-brainer. We’re not going to force anything. The two dangers that I can see we’ve always skirted are, one, growing too fast ¬– and we’ve had to be careful there. The second one is stretching yourself too thin. To go from being a medium-sized firm in one state to all of a sudden having an equity interest in a whole national chain would be a very daunting and potentially high-risk move. That’s why I like the idea of being in a national network of independent firms because you get a lot of the same benefits of all being joined up without the risk.”

In your spare time, you have invented a car-cleaning product and you describe yourself as a bit of a revhead? What sort of cars do you like?
“Any of the European marks and anything that goes fast! I’ve been involved with the Porsche Club of Western Australia for many years now and I love getting out to the track.”

It highlights the importance of having passions outside work.
“Exactly. We’ve just launched an initiative called HHG Lifestyle and its main mandate has been to address the whole work-life balance issue in a more radical manner and to cut through the jargon and to deliver practical working benefits for our staff. It’s fascinating to see the ideas that the committee has come back with so far because it comes back to the fact that you’ve got to enjoy life outside the law. That’s more than simply being about hours at work. You’ve got to have hobbies and interests that drive you to stop thinking about work. And if you have a significant other interest in life, you’ll make time for it and all the firm then needs to do is facilitate that.”

Your other life outside work involves politics with the Liberal Party in Western Australia. What impact does that have on work and networks?
“We have to be careful that were not seen as a Liberal Party firm because that is my personal disposition and I’m certainly quite highly involved with the Liberal Party over here. But it’s been great because we have a bunch of senior lawyers who could not be more left-wing and more interested in the Greens and other left-wing parties and we have some fantastic internal discussions. It also lends itself to a much broader client base than I might attract on my own. We don’t agree on a lot, but we have a lot of fun discussing it.”

Finally, your firm also has a commitment to philanthropy and giving back. How significant is that within HHG?
“It is genuinely a very important part of HHG and I would always encourage our profession to do more and more. It already does a lot, but we are in a privileged position where we can offer pro bono assistance and get behind charity groups and community groups. I think it is a responsibility that all law firms have.”