I coach law firm partnerships
to unlock their performance mojo
Jonathan Watmough, award-winning former City law firm Managing Partner.
Twenty-eight years as an agent of change inside law firm partnerships.
Now helping law firm leaders to solve the problem no strategy consultant addresses.
A DIFFERENT CATEGORY OF WORK
Management consultants talk about the Business of Law - strategy, positioning, pricing, technology, AI. Big questions but the wrong starting point and the reason why most firms underperform and most strategies never get implemented.
I start with the Business of Partnership.
This is not a methodology but a philosophy born of long experience at the coal face of law firm change. That a genuine, co-entrepreneurial, high-performance partnership is the human, political and cultural engine which makes strategy possible.
Get partnership wrong and nothing of any importance changes: "culture eats strategy for breakfast".
THE URGENCY
Behind the annual growth rhetoric and the distorting effects of inflation, the data is stark. Notwithstanding huge growth in client demand, the underlying business of the average Top 100 UK law firm has stagnated over the long term.
Strong revenue and profit growth have masked that over the ten years to 2024 the average market value of the work done (revenue per lawyer) slightly declined, the profitability of the work (profit per lawyer) flatlined and equity returns (profit per equity partner) grew marginally but only because the equity gate was locked shut. Some firms have done better but many have done worse.
This is no longer sustainable - AI is a hurricane force wind that will blast away many long-standing fundamentals of our world. Partnerships that are underperforming their peers are about to be cruelly exposed.
THE REAL PROBLEM
It has been easier for most firms to grow in size than to fix the underlying business - because the underlying business is not the firm's to fix.
A firm's underlying business is a collection of many businesses belonging to individual partners who own the personal client relationships which generate the work. And so the partners have to want to fix their own businesses.
But partners are personally hard wired to preserve the status quo and maintain business as usual. Our resistance to change is a normal and entirely unconscious consequence of who we are and the work we do. But when these inherent personal characteristics were combined with the greatly intensifying external market forces of recent years, most firms had no choice but to grow for growth's sake to try to outrun huge increases in the cost of doing business.
They were trapped within the normal law firm existential mode of operating as a short-term annual profit sharing enterprise, maintaining business as usual and growing by just getting more people to do the same things in the same way only in more places.
The problem, however, in partnerships is rarely insight as to what needs to change - we live daily with all of the frustrations. It's that the conversation rarely happens because the elephants in the room are personal - partners' capabilities, their fit, their confidence, their fears and their vested interests in the status quo.
I help partnerships address those elephants in the room by separating the business problem from the personal one. I create the conditions for unavoidable logic, where the partnership comes together, coheres, unites, aligns and arrives at the case for change itself, attitudinally, culturally and without drama.
I help partnerships become expert in the Business of Partnership.
A DIFFERENT CATEGORY OF WORK
Two conversations. One that matters most.
I coach law firm partnerships to unlock their performance mojo
ABOUT JONATHAN
Jonathan Watmough
City M&A Partner at 30
Managing Partner at 38
3 x winner of Law Firm of the Year
2 x named in The Lawyer's HOT 100 lawyers in the UK
The Managing Partners' Forum's 'Strategic Leadership Award'
Trusted adviser, author & speaker
I am passionate about influencing and inspiring law firm partners and partnerships to thrive.
I was born in the Yorkshire Dales but raised in the Sussex Downs. Before the law, I worked as a lifeguard, gardener, dishwasher, hotel porter, humper in a meat factory, decorator, builder's mate and bartender. My parents both left school at 15 and I was the first in my family to go to university.
I qualified as a Solicitor in The City of London in 1993, practising in M&A and equity capital markets. I became a partner at thirty, managing partner at thirty-eight and spent the next ten years helping to transform RPC from a London insurance firm into an international, multi-disciplinary professional services business.
The firm delivered five consecutive years of double-digit top and bottom-line organic compound growth when the rest of the market stagnated following the Global Financial Crisis, won Law Firm of the Year three times, won the Managing Partners’ Forum’s strategic leadership award and was named five years running as Best Legal Employer.
After ten years at the helm, I retired from the firm in 2016 to work on the Business of Partnership. Experience had taught me that law firm success rarely comes from clever strategy. It comes from influencing the minds and inspiring the hearts of partners, individually and collectively - getting the partnership itself to acknowledge, and want to do, the right things.
I was fortunate to be schooled in this by two remarkable mentors, who understood both the art and the science of making partnership work. It is what I know best, where I have had real success and where I believe I can be most useful to others now. A high-performance partnership culture is a remarkable thing.
In 2024 I wrote it down in How To Thrive In A Commercial Law Firm.
"Under managing partner Jonathan Watmough's leadership, RPC has become one of the most vibrant and best-run firms in the mid-market."
The Lawyer, 2014
WHAT I DO
I work exclusively with senior leaders in law firms. Those who lead firms, divisions, offices or key teams and who carry the weight of the future, usually alone.
To earn the partner mandate for change
A mandate to get the right things done isn't a title. It's given by others and can be removed. I help leaders understand their partners and their partnership - the politics, the hopes, the fears, the opportunities, the threats and the vested interests - and to build the partner alignment that makes positive change both happen and stick.
To release ambition, leadership, governance and profit sharing blockages
Law firm partnerships are hard wired to promote business as usual and preserve the status quo. And it takes the careful curation of a peculiar confluence of conditions to break out, and stay out, of this. I help leaders identify the weaknesses, clear the blockages and build the right systems to drive partner ambition, support change and enable a smooth transition to individual and collective accountability.
To be the experienced sidekick the role demands
Leadership in law firms is always difficult, usually thankless and potentially dangerous. I provide the perspective, the pivotal guidance at the key moments and the unswerving personal support which rarely exists inside the building.
THE PROOF
In almost 300 pages, I set out the philosophy behind everything I do and why I do it. All of the thinking, made public - something that has never been done before by someone of my background.
"It deserves to be widely read across commercial law firms. In many ways, it is essential reading and a fantastic addition to the law firm management library."
The Law Society Gazette