Interview with: Chris Seaton, Senior Partner

1) What do you see as the main points that differentiate Burges Salmon from your competitors?

Distinctiveness in the legal market is a challenge for many firms.  We all aspire to provide excellent service to our clients, to be responsible businesses and to attract a more diverse workforce into a profession not traditionally known for its diversity of backgrounds.

So what makes Burges Salmon unique? Our differentiated brand positioning has been borne out of conversations and research with our own people, clients and teams across the firm. This extensive listening programme has given us a strong reflection of who we are as a firm and our people and clients alike differentiate us based on the breadth of talent we have across the UK, our authenticity, and our focus on building relationships.

Our brand statement is closely aligned with the values we hold as a business. Our values – ambition, collaboration, commitment, fairness, quality and respect – set the tone and high standards we ser for ourselves in how we run our firm. At the core of who we are as a business is ambition: we’re ambitious for our clients and provide them with the highest quality service, we’re ambitious for our people, creating every opportunity to grow and reward talent and we’re ambitious for our communities, providing the support that makes impact where it matters most.

What makes us stand-out? We would say it’s the efforts we make to build long-term relationships whether this is with our clients, our people or the organisations we work with as part of our responsible business agenda. Our relationship-based model, coupled with values and a culture that are central to our purpose, make us a reliable, trusted and authentic partner that clients can work with throughout the life cycle of their business. Client-centricity is at the core of everything we do, ensuring we always anticipate, understand and meet our clients’ needs.  This is embedded across our business and means that we’re able to add value at every stage of the client journey.

ESG is also a genuine point of differentiation for us, in that we’re authentic, collaborative and specialists. ESG is a fundamental strand of who we are as a firm and it’s anchored in our heritage: we were amongst the first law firms to launch a dedicated environment team over 25 years ago, a practice that remains market-leading today. Since then, we have evolved our ESG expertise beyond transactional support to provide advisory and forward-thinking advice, while developing its own internal initiatives. You will always find a real enthusiasm for ESG at Burges Salmon which stems from our genuinely caring and supportive culture and the lens through which all of our advice is delivered.

Our brand positioning also supports our vision to be the market leading independent UK law firm, providing the best proposition for our people and our clients. Unlike many firms of our size, we have resisted the temptation to merge with other firms either within the UK or internationally. Therefore, our growth has been organic which has helped us retain and develop a unique culture. We are a UK-wide firm with a compelling international proposition through our relationships with the very best independent firms (our Preferred Firms) across the globe. This allows us to provide a highly flexible and a highly specialist international offering to our clients.

 

2) Which practices do you see growing in the next 12 months? What are the drivers behind that?

In 2021, we launched our BAmbitious strategy which is a five-year strategy taking us to 2026.  In years 1 and 2 of this five-year strategy, we’ve been pursuing growth across the whole firm. We’ve seen significant growth in Edinburgh, where we now have more than 70 people – which has happened in less than five years – and during the 2022/23 financial year, we saw strong double digit revenue growth in a number of our key sectors (including Transport, Energy and Utilities and Public Sector), and practices (Defence, Dispute Resolution, Planning and Compulsory Purchase, Construction & Engineering and Real Estate).

As a firm, we have a broad practice mix and that makes us resilient and over the next 12 months, we will continue the pursuit of an ambitious strategy for growth across the firm,  which will see us  working side-by-side with our clients to build strong and long-lasting relationships. From an international perspective, we will also continue to develop our key Preferred Firm relationships in key jurisdictions across the globe.  Looking ahead, areas around infrastructure investment, mergers and acquisitions, dispute resolution, restructuring and insolvency and issues arising from geopolitical conflicts are likely to be in high demand.

As part of our commitment to support the ESG agenda and help clients meet their ESG goals and help them derive real value from them, we’ve developed a number of ESG products for clients including an ESG Risk Review, ESG Corporate Disclosure Tool, Modern Slavery Statement compliance check and an ESG Pensions Tool. The latter consolidates all ESG guidance, legislation and other useful resources, into one interactive, intuitive platform, allowing pension scheme trustees and sponsoring employers to seamlessly navigate between ESG requirements, standards, and best practice.

Aligned with our ambition to develop and grow our talent, we’ve also rolled out a training programme to support lawyers with having meaningful and impactful ESG conversations with clients. Combining traditional learning techniques, business development skills and a coaching-style approach, the programme has proved ground-breaking in empowering lawyers to engage authentically with their clients around ESG. The programme supports Burges Salmon’s ESG offering, which provides comprehensive, consolidated support to help clients manage ESG risks and realise the opportunities.

 

3) What’s the main change you’ve made in the firm that will benefit clients?

The firm has invested in a Client Experience project to identify the most critical elements of the client journey and to ensure it is in the best position to deliver an exceptional level of service.  This has been driven by our client-centric strategy and a focus on improving the ease of doing business with us.

The project involved the appointment of external consultants who made recommendations based on having worked closely with partners, lawyers and business services teams as well as key clients.  We now have a deeper understanding of the moments that matter in our clients’ experience of working with us and as a result, we can put in place appropriate plans for continuous improvement.  The outputs from the project will result in a programme of change across both legal and operational teams.

 

4) Is technology changing the way you interact with your clients, and the services you can provide them?

Yes, but when it comes to technology, we are not simply jumping on the bandwagon. Our focus is clear: providing a service that our clients really value. We recognise the power of technology but also know the importance of keeping people at the centre of our solutions – it’s the combination of technology, process improvement and appropriate resourcing together with new thinking and smart solutions which is key.

We take time to understand our clients’ needs and provide solutions that suit each matter.  Our Innovation team leverages technology, and its multi-disciplinary skillset, to develop innovative solutions for clients delivering value and augmenting relationships to enhance client service delivery.  For example, the team was approached by a client to assist with the “art of the possible” to improve engagement with the organisation’s internal compliance process. By taking a collaborative approach to innovative service delivery, the Innovation team was able to effectively assess the client’s needs, identify appropriate technology and consequently design and develop an interactive compliance tool using Burges Salmon clientspace.

As a firm, we have a continuous programme of investment and a portfolio of projects to maximise the efficiency and quality of our legal work, with a focus on client service delivery. For example, we have invested in document automation tools to automate and deploy suites of legal documentation, increasing the efficiency and enhancing client service delivery.  Automation technology is also enabling more self-serve solutions, for example we have developed BScale – a suite of automated legal documentation for start-ups and scale-ups available to our contacts free of charge.

We have an ongoing Enhancing Technology Programme, which includes various technology and innovation investments focused on providing the firm and our clients with a better technology experience, and ensuring our people flourish in a more efficient working environment. We have developed an advanced technology toolkit to deliver service delivery improvements to clients and this approach ensures that we deliver optimum results and value for money.

Recognising the importance of data, we also have a multi-year data strategy, with a focus on enhancing client relationships. Alongside this, we are working on the development of our multidimensional AI strategy, which has a specific focus on enhancing productivity and building client relationships.

 

5) Can you give us a practical example of how you have helped a client to add value to their business?

We’re specialists in complex legal areas, with market sector expertise that’s as deep as it is focused. Always forward-thinking, we guide our clients through rapidly changing business environments, identifying opportunity whenever we can.

In July 2023, our Renewable Energy team advised leading solar energy provider Atrato Onsite Energy on its partnership with Britvic, the FTSE 250 global soft drinks business, to deliver clean energy to Britvic via an innovative 10-year PPA, developed by Squeaky. Atrato will supply Britvic with solar electricity that is commercialised on a pay as you generate basis but is delivered on a baseload basis that is consistent to the consumption needs of the company. This is a real innovation in the corporate PPA market.

Gurpreet Gujral, Managing Director and Head of Renewable Energy at Atrato adds: “We are thrilled to enter into this new corporate PPA with Britvic. Our highly innovative PPA structure provides Britvic with a consistent source of renewable energy that matches their electricity needs. This project exemplifies our commitment to providing long term and attractively priced clean energy to our clients. Following an award-winning IPO, Atrato has become the ‘go to’ corporate clean energy provider. Ross and the Burges Salmon team have supported us on all of our recent transactions in the renewable sector and we are, as ever, extremely grateful for their expert advice and excellent client service.”

In August 2023, we advised London-based fintech Communion on its new money saving app, the first of its kind, seeking to tackle underlying and pervasive money anxiety. Founded with the belief that ‘saving is freedom’, Communion is the first ever app to provide the right conditions for building wealth including habit formation and behaviour change training as well as offering tools to save and grow earnings. Members are coached through a personalised 12-step wealth-building plan and explore their own unique relationship with money with the help of Communion’s community and unlimited access to its team of Money Guides. Members can earn up to 5.66% on savings, making Communion’s savings account one of the most competitive on the market today.

Founder and CEO of Communion, Daniel Hegarty, says: “We believe everyone has the ability to take control of their money and build a buffer against the world, so long as they’re given the right conditions, tools and support to do so. We created Communion for people who want to live life with more autonomy and less fear. We thank the team at Burges Salmon for their continued support as we bring Communion to market.”

 

6) Are clients looking for stability and strategic direction from their law firms – where do you see the firm in three year’s time?

Clients face increasing volumes of complex work, greater regulatory scrutiny and rising cost pressures. To meet these challenges, they’re looking for trusted legal advisors that that only have the resources and scale needed to deal with large projects, but those also able to offer innovative solutions to support more streamlined and cost-efficient legal processes.

Clients are also increasingly aware of how the credentials and reputation of the businesses they work with can reflect on their own brand and so values and culture continue to take centre stage in how clients engage with their preferred law firms, firms that have an authenticity to their culture, support their people and are committed to their corporate responsibilities. Clients will also seek their legal partner to advise them on their own net zero and ESG journey and so law firms who walk the walk and who are meeting their own responsible business goals across all three pillars of ESG will boast great competitive advantage.

In three years’ time, we will be at the beginning of our next strategic cycle which will mark the next chapter in our firm’s ongoing and exciting journey. Also, in three years’ time we’ll be a net zero business as we’ve committed to net zero emissions by 2026 which we’re achieving through a combination of continued energy reductions and efficiency gains, and for unavoidable residual emissions, we will continue to invest in high-quality carbon offsetting projects.