RedLaw Recruitment interviewed Haynes and Boone, LLP’s London Managing Partner Brad Richards for a Spotlight feature about his childhood, personal facts, passions outside the law, the biggest influence on his career, the firm’s 2025 Plan, and other topics.
Here is an excerpt:
RedLaw: Brad, you joined Haynes and Boone back in 1992 moving into the role as London's Managing Partner just over three years ago. In the 30 plus years here, what have been the biggest changes you have seen within both the Firm and the legal industry and what in your opinion has been the most positive change?
Brad Richards: Technology has revolutionised the legal industry, changing the way lawyers deliver services in dramatic ways. Our firm has changed with the times, while holding fast to the values and culture that helped us to grow, prosper and provide value to ourselves and our clients. We continually upgrade the technological tools available to our lawyers, including providing, at no cost to the lawyer, the option to outfit a home office with a telephone, computer docking station and additional monitor to support working from home. Overall, technological change has been positive, removing some of the drudgery from the practice (new transactional lawyers may not know that young lawyers in my generation were forced to redline documents by hand), but the changes bring with them an ever-present focus on productivity that has become the norm for modern life (and not just for law firms).
RedLaw: The 2020 plan was launched back in 2005 and included entering the London market in 2016. The Firm has recently moved to new shiny offices in Fetter Lane to accommodate the considerable growth in headcount. Tell us a little more about the London story and how it has integrated with the network of international offices.
Richards: I was personally thrilled with the development of the 2020 plan, both because it created a strong vision for national and international expansion and because it involved all lawyers in the planning process (even those who planned to be retired by that date). It is imperative for partners to accept the need to invest not only in their own practice, but also the practices of the lawyers who are younger than them. At that time, we set the goal to be in London for a very simple reason (taking liberties with the words of “Rule Britannia”): English law rules the waves. Much of the world relies on English law and a law firm with ambitions to expand its global footprint absolutely must be in London and have English solicitors on its staff. It may have helped that one of our founding partners, Dick Haynes, was an Anglophile – I’m sure his love for all thing English set us on the course for an eventual opening in London. Admittedly, however, we opened elsewhere internationally first, in large part because we didn’t want to simply plant a flag in London and see if the world would come to us. We wanted to have an English reason for being in England. I dare say that merging with Curtis Davis Garrard, and working out the details of a transatlantic tie-up with Simon Curtis, CDG’s founding partner, gave us that reason. …
To read the full article, click here.