AFTER the opening day of the 1995-96 English Premiership season that saw a youthful Manchester United side beaten 3-1 by Aston Villa, BBC pundit Alan Hansen confidently declared, 'You will never win anything with kids'. Nine months later, United were league and cup champions and Hansen's face was left as red as the Liverpool shirt he once played in.
At around the same time as the young Beckham, Giggs, Scholes, et al lifted that season's silverware, a fledgling law firm in Glasgow decided it, too, would place its faith in youth.
Harper Macleod, a practice formed just seven years before by Lorn
e Crerar and Rod McKenzie, made the decision to shun the "lateral hires" policy that had hitherto proved such a successful way to grow legal practices. Instead, the firm pledged to become what Professor Crerar calls "an employer of choice", attracting the top legal talent, retaining them and not placing any externally recruited partners in the way of their progress.
"I sat down and worked out what are the key things that motivate lawyers to join a firm and stay in a firm," explains Prof Crerar, now the chairman of Harper Macleod. "The four things were: where you work (you want to work in nice surroundings), the people you work with (you want to work with nice, interesting people), you want to do interesting work and you want to be well paid."
The theory, Prof Crerar says, was that if the firm could meet these four criteria, none of its staff would want to leave.
"It sounds very easy," he continues, "but the second part was I wanted to advance the people in the business that came to the firm. To do that, we had to have open horizons. The promise was, we would not make lateral hires in areas of work where we were developing our own talent. So, as we grew and developed the business, we weren't eclipsing our own horizons by taking a real estate team or employment team, or whoever, from another firm.
"The only circumstances in which we have laterally hired is where we didn't have the gene pool. For example, we hired a pensions lawyer and a transactional banking lawyer. We haven't appointed anybody that has stood in the way of the advancement of our young people."
It is a policy that seems to be working. Last Wednesday, the firm scooped two awards at the Managing Partner Forum European Practice Management Awards, being named best-managed firm and recognised for its achievements in people management. With 41 partners and 130 fee-earners working in 29 specialist areas, the firm has reported a 175 per cent rise in profits over the past five years.
Even in the turbulent months to March 2009, it could still boast a rise in turnover of 2.5 per cent, to £14.1m. And at a time when firms are shedding training contracts as well as lawyers, Harper Macleod reported a 100 per cent trainee retention rate this year and no redundancies.
According to Prof Crerar, these are the fruits of the recruitment policy. "It stood us in pretty good stead for the credit crunch, because we are such a young business," he says. "The average age of a lawyer in Harper Macleod is 31, and we were able to move 20 per cent of our lawyers who were in our real estate, private client and corporate teams into litigious areas of the business. Their age spread was between 23 and 27, and we were able to retrain really successfully and we didn't need to make any redundancies."
It is a nimbleness that Prof Crerar insists the profession as a whole needs to adopt. He contends that the many firms that are implementing four-day weeks or compulsory additional holidays are treading water for a boom that may never arise, certainly not in the short term.
"I have seen two recessions," he says. "This is not like the early Nineties or the early Eighties; this is nothing like we have seen before.
"What the task is at the moment, is trying to work out, when the mist clears, what will the legal supply be and what are people going to want lawyers to do?
"It is not going to be the work of the credit bubble, it's not going to be highly leveraged debt corporate deals. That won't come back for some time.
He continues: "We need to make sure we do stay quite fleet of foot and that people are prepared to change, and we don't look to history as the way things are going to be in future, because I don't think that is going to happen, at least in the short to medium term of five years."
One component of that change could be the introduction of the alternative business structures (ABS), currently the subject of a bill before the Scottish Parliament. When asked if ABS is under consideration by the firm's board, Prof Crerar answers with a firm "no", adding: "Our strategy is to make sure we are making as much as we can out of the crisis. By that, I mean following the old adage, 'Never waste the opportunity of a good crisis'. That is wholly taking up our focus. We are going through a three-year strategy review, and ABS isn't featuring in that."
He does concede that the strategy could see the firm move into areas in which it hasn't been active before.
"But I'm not telling you what they are," he laughs.
