Henry Nassau took over as Dechert's CEO in 2016, and in the years since, the firm's head count and revenue have grown annually to cement it as a billion-dollar firm. In this interview, part of our series of conversations with law firm leaders, he discusses the value of alternative fee agreements, clients' requests for innovation, and the challenge of navigating a turbulent global economy.

The American Lawyer: What is your firm's governance structure?

Henry Nassau: Dechert has a central policy committee of 14 partners, of which Andy Levander is the chair. I am the firm's chief executive officer. In addition to our practice group heads, we have deputy chair posts for various firmwide initiatives, such as cross-practice group client development, diversity and inclusion, international development, marketing, strategic growth, talent and risk management.

TAL: What do you view as your core areas of strength, either by practice area or industry?

HN: Dechert can be difficult to define, because we are known for a number of quite different and specialized practice areas. What binds this all together and makes Dechert such a formidable firm is its very strong culture of mutual support and the quality of our work. Our focus is on the most complex and challenging situations that face our clients, those areas that bring the most risks and require the best lawyers and the most innovative thinking. Dechert is well known for its financial services practice, as well as private equity, including leveraged finance and permanent capital. As capital markets become more efficient, we enjoy the benefit of these practice areas converging. We also have very strong capabilities in restructuring, securities litigation, antitrust and life sciences. Both white-collar and product liability are marquee practices, and they are also huge growth areas for us. Our European white-collar team is currently handling the largest ongoing investigation in Europe, and our product liability team has had a series of huge trial wins this year for Pfizer in the Lipitor and Zoloft disputes.

TAL: What do you view as the biggest opportunities for your firm, and what are the biggest threats in the coming year or so?

HN: As a firm, we have the potential to significantly grow our key practice areas on our global platform. Growth in terms of head count and revenue has been consistent for us now for several years, and we expect that to continue into and beyond 2020. Our longer-term strategy includes technology and innovation to help us support our clients in even more sophisticated ways. I think the biggest threat to the success of our business is not taking those opportunities that we know are there. If we don't take them, someone else will.

TAL: How have you altered your business model or firm structure, if at all, to compete in a changing legal landscape?

HN: All successful businesses have to be agile and evolve, and all of our adaptations are driven by our clients' needs. One of our core strategic aims as a firm is to grow in size. We have potential to be substantially larger as a business, and so we have made changes to how we manage our lateral partner recruitment process. We recently created two new roles: chief strategy officer and global director of partner recruiting. Much of our success in the past has been built around lateral partners, and as that market gets increasingly competitive, we have to adapt to ensure we are attracting and retaining the highest-level talent.

TAL: Who do you see as your chief competition, including any type of service provider?

HN: We are regarded as a top law firm in terms of the success of our practices, and our quality and brand, so we compete directly with all the leading global law firms. But even outside the top-ranking firms, there are a lot of other very good law firms, so it depends on the practice which specific firms we compete with.

TAL: In looking ahead at the next 12 months, share with us your plans around the following topics at your firm:

HN: Growth (or retrenchment): Our growth plans are centered on the economic centers where most of our clients need the deepest support. But we are a global firm in every sense of the word, and where there is client need and opportunity, we will look to grow in a sustainable and effective way.

Talent management: In 2019, we rolled out our culture statement, a message to all our employees about our own values and ethos as a business, which focuses on excellence in service, innovative and creative thinking and how we build community within the workplace. Our aim now is to embed those values and live them on a day-to-day basis. In June, we held our first Gratitude Week, designed to instill gratitude deeper into our culture and further build our community connections. We have also been very proactive in empowering our staff. We have a new gender-neutral U.S. parental leave policy that applies to all employees. Our SASS (Sponsorship and Sustained Support) program was launched by our Global Women's Initiative, reflecting our commitment to the career development of our female associates and helping lawyers successfully navigate the path to partnership. And, finally, we want to promote the fact that we respect and value everyone's voice. We have a new Diversity Champions award—a $10,000 bonus recognizing employees for excellence in diversity and inclusion leadership, and also new inclusive leadership training, to address affinity bias, attribution bias, covering, in and out groups, joking/banter, mansplaining, priming and unconscious bias.

Pricing/AFAs: Dechert has been an industry leader in AFAs, and we estimate that they now represent nearly half of our revenue. We started to see widespread adoption of AFAs back in 2010-11, coming out of the global recession. They have since caught on even more, and are the preferred arrangement for most of our banking, regulatory and pharmaceutical clients. While the initial focus was more on the pricing side, we have expanded to full reporting and project management since. We think the latter—developing our project management capabilities and capacity—is a key area of growth for the next 12 months, with additional focus on training a broader set of our lawyers to further strengthen our project management skills and ensure more efficient and effective work for clients. Our goal is to have the majority of our lawyers trained over the next few years, with an eye on actual project management certifications on the horizon. We are confident in our ability to deliver high value to our clients and have our economic relations with our clients reflect that.

TAL: What high-level professional roles (C-suite or equivalent) does your firm have, and which ones are client facing?

HN: We have the following C-suite posts: chief operating officer, chief marketing officer, chief financial officer, chief talent and human resources officer, chief information officer, chief administrative officer and chief strategy officer.

TAL: What would you say is the most innovative thing your firm has done recently?

HN: Our technology team has launched a number of transformative projects that aim to enhance our client service and save both time and resources for Dechert and its clients. An intelligent innovation strategy is one that challenges the status quo and is not afraid to experiment to find the best methods of delivering service to clients. In practice, this has led to projects that embed software tools into common working processes, with startling results. One project has cut associate time for data analysis on a major client matter from around six weeks to half a day, freeing practitioners up for the more complex aspects of client work. In another project, Dechert is preparing an automation tool that can quickly review tens of thousands of documents to assist our clients in converting any LIBOR-related agreements efficiently and effectively.

TAL: What are clients asking for lately that feels new or evolving?

HN: On the operations side, we're seeing a lot more questions in the last year about service innovation through alternative providers and AI-driven tech. This is not new, but definitely evolving and becoming more prevalent. On the matters side, white-collar has been a major driver of our growth in recent years, and we have noticed that companies increasingly want to identify malfeasance as soon as they can. As companies have matured in compliance, they have improved in detecting issues earlier. So a successful outcome means having the internal controls to discover minor problems and address them before they snowball into crises.

TAL: What keeps you up at night?

HN: Exogenous events in the global political environment combined with the deep interdependence of the global economy on cooperation among governments around the globe where we practice.