DWF managing partner & CEO Andrew Leaitherland talks to Legal Week about what makes the firm a Best Legal Adviser for 2016-17

How do you deliver true value and how do you benchmark the value given? This requires understanding, contributing and, often, leading a client's agenda rather than reacting to it. We understand our clients and their businesses by focusing on creating multi-layered, cross-functional relationships with their teams, ensuring we build strong, mutually valuable relationships. Success is benchmarked through robust reporting against agreed KPIs. We approach this through real-time information and metrics being fed back, examining financial metrics and deeper emotive metrics, such as how well we understand and embed our clients' culture into service delivery. This allows us to understand our performance by delivering value that our clients truly value.

How do you differentiate your offering in an increasingly crowded and competitive market? Our approach is to 'do things differently' – that mindset is actively facilitated throughout the firm. This has seen us strengthen and expand our UK footprint and start building a strategic international presence in key locations, in careful response to client demand. We don't look at differentiating ourselves or targeting growth for its own sake. It's about listening carefully to understand more about what clients want and how we could better work with them. We also listen to our people: how they can best use their expertise and ideas to maximise relationships and create deeper, more relevant value. In a crowded and competitive market, our focus is our clients – where we can add value. That includes how and where we can deliver that work.

What innovation(s) have you introduced in the last year that has/have added most value to clients? Our automation service, DWF draft, has succeeded for our clients because it has been a success for our people. We have developed automation technology, scaling and rolling it out so that it maximises our uptake across the firm, allowing our people to extract the most value. It has freed up their time in terms of drafting, which has a ripple effect on productivity and efficiency throughout the business. This creates added value for our clients because our people can deliver process-driven work faster and more cost effectively, enabling them to focus on adding further value and insight to client projects.

What clients like about the firm • Great teamwork and excellent understanding of our business • They know my business, they get results, their advice is very sound and we work as a team • Expertise and experience in my area of law

DWF's top scores 1. Partner-level contact 2. Quality of legal advice 3. Overall relationship with firm

For more information visit: www.dwf.law

The Best Legal Advisers Report will be published in December. For more information email [email protected] or call her on +44 (0) 203 868 7545.