Slaughter and May's financing and corporate practice heads, Andrew McClean and Andy Ryde, explain to Pui-Guan Man how they aim to balance leadership duties with expanding their fee-earning work

When Slaughter and May corporate practice head Andy Ryde and financing head Andrew McClean were appointed to their leadership roles in March, some of their loved ones were perplexed.

The duo, who took up their positions on 1 May, are bracing themselves for hectic three-year terms in their respective roles, outlining aims to dedicate 30% of their time to practice head responsibilities on top of expanding their fee-earning practices. Their new titles, however, do not come with much fanfare or indeed any more pay.

"My 15-year-old daughter said to me when I took this job on: 'Let me get this straight, dad. It's a lot of extra work for the same money. So just talk me through why you're doing this again?'" Ryde recounts. "And it's quite a hard question to answer. Andrew [McClean] and I both have all the clients we had on the last day of April and intend to grow our practices, not shrink them. We have to fit this extra work in on evenings and weekends, which is great fun for our families."

Ryde and McClean have had their hands full heading up the powerhouse practices ever since.

In his corporate leadership role Ryde teams up with head of M&A Steve Cooke to oversee the practice's four teams, which house roughly 10 partners and 40 associates each. Meanwhile, McClean is tasked with overseeing 22 finance partners across three sub-groups. He has also been coordinating efforts to bring in new lateral associate hires, which the team is currently reviewing. These individual teams are named according to the initials of the most senior partner on each.

Despite Slaughters' strong reputation in Europe, it has in recent years faced well-documented criticism that clients and referral firms alike may be outgrowing the firm's staid strategic approach to international expansion. Apart from Brussels, Beijing and Hong Kong, the London firm has no overseas offices of its own, preferring to build relationships with other firms across the globe.

With Ryde and McClean's teams collectively contributing the lion's share of the elite firm's revenue, it falls to the two lawyers to help convince clients that Slaughters' practices are more agile than its traditional image might suggest to the outside world.

Aiming higher
Renowned for cornering the market on lucrative deals for leading UK corporates, Slaughters already acts for 32 FTSE 100 clients, more than any rival, and 48 of the FTSE 250, according to the Corporate Advisers Rankings Guide. The firm's clients include Marks & Spencer, Aviva and GlaxoSmithKline. All told, the firm advises 122 London-listed companies.

But the corporate practice has no intention of stopping there. Ryde is overseeing several  business development initiatives intended to conquer as much of the FTSE 100 as possible, barring those with conflicts of interest.

"Although we have a fantastic position on the corporate side, there are still companies we don't act for but could," says Ryde. "Obviously, there are sectors where it's hard for us to act for more clients without having conflicts but there are other sectors where there are certainly opportunities."

Meanwhile, the financing team is frequently instructed by the likes of Deutsche Bank, Santander, Barclays and JP Morgan, and McClean says he intends to focus on broadening the range of work done for financial institutions.

However, these aims do not come without potential speed bumps, one of which remains the firm's comparatively understated international presence.

Slaughters vs the world
As part of Slaughters' longstanding arrangement with its five European 'best friend' firms, the corporate and finance teams meet regularly with their counterparts at Hengeler Mueller in Germany, Bredin Prat in France, Bonelli Erede Pappalardo in Italy, De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek in the Netherlands and Uria Menendez in Spain and Portugal to assess opportunities for deal work and coordinate efforts in mutual areas of interest through a structured programme. Ryde and Cooke, for example, sit on a steering group comprising the heads of corporate at the best friends.

Slaughters also has a looser network with firms such as Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison and Cravath Swaine & Moore in the US.

With the firm staying true to its pool of exclusive referral relationships and modest group of four offices rather than investing in a more sprawling overseas offering as its rivals have, partners concede it occasionally needs to go the extra mile to convince clients that it is just as committed to international work as its larger competitors.

McClean admits that while the limited international strategy attracts sufficiently sizeable mandates for the finance team, the group sometimes needs to work harder to highlight to financial institutions the advantages of a referral network, particularly when it comes to banking clients used to operating as a one-stop shop. 

"In truth it is often less intuitive for bank clients that [we have] a better offering. On the borrower side we're certainly not complacent – this is an ongoing battle really, debate has been swinging back and forth from as far back as 1998 when firms first had to have an international strategy," says McClean.

"We have a different one and sometimes frankly it leaves us having to do more to explain and in some cases having to do more to win over. We're certainly not complacent about that but clients would say it is all so far so good in relation to the work that is important to us."

In contrast, on the corporate side, Ryde asserts that the rise of a global 'one-stop shop' mentality in the legal market has not made a significant impression on clients. "There are some very sophisticated GCs out there who understand that branch networks are not the answer because they can be patchy," explains Ryde. "Our model, on the other hand, focuses on the very best people in each country. Clients understand our model, it's a simple one but, rather than having a branch network, we prefer to be agile and have access to the elite lawyers in the jurisdictions that are important to the deal."

Spreading the net
Both men admit there is room to rethink the firm's approach faced with globalising clients. One of the ambitions of the financing practice is trying to win more English law debtor finance work in Europe and beyond.

McClean says: "We're convinced there is quite a swathe of big and medium-sized corporates using English law quite a lot in their finance documents, which [we don't act for] partly because we haven't in all cases got the message through that we can also do work wherever they are. So that is at or near the top of my list of aims."
The practices each have a nominated partner responsible for leading international efforts in different jurisdictions. When it comes to building relationships with stateside clients and firms, for instance, partner Richard Smith is coordinating the corporate practice's US efforts, while partner Matthew Tobin is his counterpart on the finance team.

Overall the firm has teams focusing on 23 key countries and regions set up to understand each local landscape and capture deals on the horizon that can be brought into the six nations best friends group.

Ryde says both practices are aiming for "more structure and rigour" to international efforts targeting work from the FTSE 350, overseas multinationals and investment banks. "The strategy is still the same – to be the key relationship adviser to as many companies that might be doing important transactions as we can.

"The focus is now more on geographies," Ryde continues. "We have large initiatives underway in Africa, Asia and the US, where we're particularly keen to make sure outbound US deals into Europe are coming to us as well as transactions within Europe.
"We want to make sure the work coming out of those countries, the outbound work, is also being picked up by us and our best friends. Between the best friends firms, we have got more partners on the ground, more clients and a bigger share of the large M&A deals coming out of Europe than all of our competitors, but we can do even better.

"We're on planes all the time meeting clients and law firms. It's partly attitudinal, to raise the consciousness of GCs and other decision-makers out there that we're the firm to come to for all their major international work. It's also making sure all the law firms we work with around the world are not just focused inwardly on the deals they might do themselves but also outwardly on what their clients are doing overseas, making sure that work comes to us or other best friend firms."

McClean adds: "Of my 25 years with Slaughter and May I've spent slightly more than half of that living outside London. It's not something most people would assume for a Slaughter and May partner. So in terms of outreach, we've always done that and we intend to redouble it."

Behind the scenes
Because partners are trusted to build their practices with minimal interference from central management, the advantages of holding a practice group head position are heavily downplayed, with Ryde describing the nomination and election  process as "more of a reluctant response to peer pressure" instead.

"There was a vote but the process is not carried out in the same way as in some other firms – we don't run election campaigns or put out manifestos. Anyone who wants to go for high office is looked upon with great cynicism, and probably even contempt, by colleagues so it's not like that," says Ryde.

"It's more that people come to you and suggest that you stand, to which the initial reaction is 'no'. But after several visits you eventually give in. Although that's not to say we're not enjoying our roles – they're interesting."

If this is the case, what exactly is the main draw of a practice group leadership position at the firm? For both, the new responsibilities provide a more invigorating challenge on a personal level. McClean describes his remit as a "very satisfying add-on" to his fee-earning role.

Furthermore, he explains: "I felt there was a job that needed doing and found that I had reached the stage, without me noticing, where I was in a position to do it and with a group of 22 other people you know very well asking you to do it."

Ryde adds: "After several years in this job it doesn't become repetitive, but it never ceases to be hard work – doing big deals, working late nights for demanding clients. We're going to carry on doing that but this brings an additional angle that is energising and fulfilling."

Having the responsibility of ensuring lawyer workloads are balanced, on top of coordinating a heap of business development, international and knowledge and training initiatives, is no small task. But if the duo are to be believed, the firm's lack of a dominant management model means that their titles come with little grandeur.
Ryde dryly observes: "We certainly don't have any more respect shown for us since we became practice stream heads than we did before. Probably even less, actually."

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