After four years at the helm of the world’s largest law firm, Clifford Chance senior partner Stuart Popham looks ahead to his second term. Neil Rose reports




One of the great attractions of the title ‘Clifford Chance senior partner’, according to Stuart Popham, is that ‘you can find time in most people’s diaries to go and see them’. They may not want to see you again, he concedes, but it is a calling card that opens the door at least once.



It is also one that Mr Popham will be able to use for the next four years, as he begins his second term in the post. ‘[The role] has had both its ups and downs, and it’s been more varied than I thought it would be,’ he says.



Given the recent years of plenty, the ups are the kind you would hear from most of his counterparts at big City practices – ‘the success of the firm, and watching it grow and its reputation increase’. He continues: ‘If I pointed to something in particular, it would probably be the maturity and success of the European offices, having been here long enough to remember when they were starting.’



But perhaps more telling is the accomplishment of the global law firm concept. ‘I would defy anyone to go to Clifford Chance’s New York office and find much difference with the London or Paris offices,’ Mr Popham asserts. ‘That to my mind has been the success, because what we now talk of across the whole firm is “our client”, not “my client”. That’s the best evidence I’ve got behaviourally of being an integrated network.’



The figures bear this out – 43 of Clifford Chance’s top 50 clients in billing terms use ten or more offices. It sums up the business rationale of the world’s largest law firm: clients who want to use it in more than one country and in more than one practice area.



Those who remember the headlines in 2002 about the infamous associates’ memo on life in the New York office – with allegations over unfair billable hours, among other issues – need look no further for the main down of his first term. The ‘merger pains’, particularly in the US, were troubling background noise for some years – partners left and offices shut – but Mr Popham is justified in saying that the bad stories have now largely died away. ‘Looking at it now at the end of the four years, things have vastly improved,’ he says.



The memo – and the way the story raced around the world – is also evidence that Clifford Chance, arguably more than any other law firm, is news. One legal magazine seemed to have a policy at one stage of getting it on the front page every week, and Mr Popham expresses ‘resigned acceptance’ of this status, which of course has its advantages too. Understandably, the banking lawyer does not wish to dwell on the memo, but admits it was ‘the first occasion that the firm positively felt a push back’.



Part of the reason for Clifford Chance’s profile has been its historic willingness – enthusiasm, even – to be a pioneer. That, Mr Popham acknowledges, is getting harder given how much ground has already been covered. ‘Our ambition is the same, though,’ he adds, ‘and that is to be seen as the leader of our part of the legal business.’



An aspect of that leadership has been lobbying over the Clementi reforms – an interesting side-effect of the reform process has been to engage the big City firms with what is happening in the wider profession, after several years when the two seemed to be ploughing very different furrows.



Mr Popham supports the Legal Services Bill, viewing it as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to set out a framework for how the profession may develop in time. ‘Whilst we aren’t all champing at the bit to list law firms [on the stock exchange], in 20 years’ time, who knows?’



Listing seems to be the Holy Grail for those predicting the post-Clementi world. Unsurprisingly, Clifford Chance has no plans to go public, and Mr Popham describes it in any case as ‘the last part of the chain that starts with some ability to obtain access to third-party capital’. At the same time, he speculates that listing would enable firms to buy others with shares rather than cash, and also allow partners to give staff an interest in the success of the firm that goes beyond a bonus by involving capital appreciation.



Nonetheless, he can envisage a firm using external capital of some sort to effect mergers and build a practice that aims to challenge the magic circle. He says: ‘If I was in a smaller City practice, I’d be giving [external capital] a lot of thought. In the globalising world, there must be a fear that the larger, deeper-pocketed, more broadly based firms will succeed and some of the smaller firms will be squeezed.’



Initially, however, he sees the reforms having an impact on the high street – where solicitors could share resources with other professionals – and also help the likes of Clifford Chance bring non-solicitor managers into the partnership, as well as other kinds of lawyer. The firm recently recruited a senior financial services lawyer who is a barrister and now has to go through the solicitor requalification process in order to join the partnership.



‘It does beg the question of what it is that he hasn’t got, with all that experience and a qualification in a like profession, that requires him to go through these hoops,’ Mr Popham observes, accepting that in time the distinction between the different shades of lawyers may well blur.



Much has been made of the question of the Lord Chancellor’s power to appoint the proposed oversight regulator, the legal services board, with critics claiming that it could harm at least the perception of an independent legal profession. This in turn could be used by foreign authorities to make life difficult for City firms operating abroad, the argument runs, and damage overseas earnings. When it comes to this issue, Mr Popham wears more than one hat, because he is also the only legal representative on Gordon Brown’s high-level City group, launched last autumn to maintain and enhance the City of London’s competitiveness throughout the world. (He recounts, in passing, that unlike governments past, the current occupant of Number 11 is well aware of the contribution the legal sector makes to the economy.)



For the solicitor, the appointments issue ‘is not the end of the world, but it is a wedge and could be the thin end of that wedge’. The better question, he maintains, is why is the government resisting the argument that appointments be made with the concurrence of the Lord Chief Justice. He suggests the provision may even have come about by the accidental swipe of a draftsman’s pen. ‘Most of us are saying, “You didn’t set out to do that, you didn’t have that before, so why would you want to do it now?”.’



The reform process has also brought the big firms back into more direct contact with the Law Society. Mr Popham found Chancery Lane’s well-documented shenanigans of the 1990s ‘seriously embarrassing’, but in recent times he has identified ‘a much greater willingness on the part of the Law Society to do the right thing’.



Clifford Chance is openly hedging its bets, however. It has partners involved in the national body – litigator Simon Davis is on the Law Society Council, while then partner Michael Mathews was president a few years back – but also in the City of London Law Society, which is positioning itself to take a much more active representative role.



Mr Popham sees a role for both. ‘I’ve said to the Law Society, “Represent us at government level, try and do what you can to improve the image and perception of lawyers, and deal with matters such as diversity and education so as to ensure a continuing supply of trainees,’ he says. The City group, by contrast, ‘may well be better able’ to act on the narrow interests of its big firm members.



Recruitment and retention of lawyers, as for all large firms, is a difficult issue for Clifford Chance, which has a high turnover rate – although no higher than other firms, he contends. But more positively, Mr Popham says that ‘well over half of those [fee-earners] leaving [the firm] in London go to clients or potential clients’, as opposed to competitors. This indicates to him that work/life balance issues are key to the departures, and also that clients are building big in-house teams.



Life at Clifford Chance ‘will always involve long hours on occasion’, he says (he spoke to the Gazette before the death of Freshfields’ Matthew Courtney). ‘What it shouldn’t be is a perpetual diet. It’s got to be varied and there should be a balance between thinking and acting, and between innovation and repetition.’ Mr Popham does not offer any original solutions – but seems keen on job sharing – though one direction in which things could go is outsourcing low-level legal work.



When Mr Popham observed that much could change in 20 years in the legal profession, he was perhaps drawing on the experience of his own firm. This May marks the 20th anniversary of the merger that shook the legal world and created Clifford Chance. The merged firm had 1,384 employees, 15% of whom were based in the ten overseas offices. It now has 7,185 staff, 64% of whom are based in the 27 overseas offices (in 20 countries). Fee income, less than £100 million back in 1987, has now broken through the £1 billion mark.



With foreign, and particularly US, companies having taken over much of the Square Mile, the success of City lawyers in going head to head with their US competitors around the world has been much understated and underrated. ‘In the globalised world, we are not only holding our own, but prospering,’ Mr Popham says proudly of his profession. And there is no reason to doubt that Clifford Chance will continue to lead the charge.