Pracy prepares DLA for a risk-free future ;INTERVIEW: Anne Mizzi meets a pioneering lawyer turned risk manager ;DLAs new risk management director, Clive Pracy, wants to help the firms lawyers sleep better. Given his track record, it would be safe to say that they will soon be sleeping like babies. ;DLA headhunted the man who set up UK risk management departments at KPMG and Andersen Consulting to do the same for them a groundbreaking move for a law firm. ;The new DLA director, a solicitor himself, reports directly to senior partner Roger Lane-Smith and because it is such a novel role, the former Andersens partner admits: Its an act of faith on both sides. ;The straight-talking and clearly driven Mr Pracy seems to come straight from the DLA mould. He is quick to see the joke in the idea of DLA getting better at money laundering, which is one of the areas he expects to take over from the senior partner. ;For starters, Mr Pracy intends to crawl all over the business. At next weekends partners meeting, he will present his initial findings followed by a more thorough report to the board in February. ;His broad remit covers all activities with a risk element, from day-to-day decisions through to mergers and investments. Not only will he be looking for points in the process of actually giving advice which are particularly risky but he will be looking at the bigger business picture, including compliance. For example, he says: Transactional stuff is effectively commodity trading and we can make that a risk-free environment. ;But he is under no illusions. In a law firm, he says, you have an awful lot of individual people making judgements every day. People are the biggest risk. ;The strategy consists of two more phases. After two to three further months of consulting, he will assess the business risk to make sure we are doing the right work for the right people. Phase three is rolling out the risk management service to clients. To do this he will liaise directly with DLA lawyers: I dont need a department, he says. ;He practised for 15 years at City firm Barlow Lyde & Gilbert as a personal injury litigator before going in-house at his client, Esso Petroleum, when an oil tanker went down by the Alaskan coast costing the company $5 billion in fines plus the cost of the clean-up. As it evolved, I became less and less a lawyer and more of a risk manager. The idea of prevention appealed to me, he explains. ;At KPMG, Mr Pracy was charged with establishing a UK risk management practice, and ended up picking up the pieces after the Kings Cross fire for London Transport. After five years, he moved to Andersen Consulting to advise terribly vulnerable conglomerates built through acquisitions, and the likes of NatWest in selling off its investment bank. ;He says he will have failed if the department is not running itself in five years, if the guys here think I am anything other than help, and if the DLA people do not think this is a cool idea. This is the first risk he has to manage and will no doubt find out over the weekend. ;See Editorial, page 16 ; ; ;