Think professional services firms are all about stuffy men with brief cases, sitting in identikit offices? Think again. Director profiles three companies that are taking a fresher, alternative approach

The lawyer
Denise Nurse, Halebury

Halebury, established by Denise Nurse and Janvi Patel, who first met at City law firm, Charles Russell, is billed as a "virtual law firm" and draws comparisons with barrister-style chambers. According to Nurse, it's a collective of self-employed lawyers working within a single umbrella organisation.

"The idea was to refresh the legal profession and update it," explains Nurse. "We saw a gap between in-house lawyers and lawyers in private practice and established Halebury to bridge that gap."

Although the business has a small office in central London, which takes care of things such as IT setup, document storage and phone systems, most of the lawyers either work from home or from their clients' premises. Work is generated by both the individual lawyers, and by the business.

Unlike a traditional law firm, where a lawyer might only take home 20-30 per cent of the fees they generate, here lawyers can take home up to 75 per cent. But it's not just the firm's structure that's different, it's also the lawyers' outlook.

"It's time that lawyers moved on and the way that people use their lawyers moved on too," suggests Nurse. "Our approach is very entrepreneurial. Yes, it's about giving legal advice, but it should also be about helping companies to make strategic decisions about where their business is going, how they want to grow it and how they can achieve that. We want to take lawyers out of their box and make what they do more accessible."

Halebury clients range from small, up-and-coming companies who might use them as an alternative to an in-house legal team, while others are larger commercial operations that are either looking for specialists to supplement their in-house team, or to help cover maternity leave or a special project.

And while you might think that getting clients to buy into a less conventional legal firm might initially be tricky, Nurse insists that they soon see the benefits.

"Our clients want what's best for their business. Is it really in their best interests to be paying inflated fees so that a law firm can afford an expensive office in the City? Probably not. But it's not just cold, hard numbers. Yes, they can save money, but more importantly they're adding value. They're getting more transparency, more flexibility and a lawyer that really wants to engage with their business."

The flexible working structure allows the lawyers who work with Halebury to take on work that a more traditional working environment wouldn't allow. Nurse, for example, also works as a weather presenter for Sky News, having been 'discovered' via an in-house talent competition while working as an in-house media lawyer at Sky. Another of her colleagues also works as a journalist.

"It's a different way of working, but I don't see us as being part-time lawyers. Just because we don't work in an office, it doesn't mean we're not working the hours," she says. "Laptops, Blackberrys and iPhones have given us the flexibility to combine legal work with other work and this flexibility offers benefits to the client as well as the lawyer."

Nurse concedes that it's not an approach that will work for every lawyer, or every client, but sees this sort of flexible and entrepreneurial take becoming increasingly the norm."It won't happen over night, it takes a long time to change the law, and a long time to change the profession, but it will change."

The accountant
Gary White, CBHC

Gary White is corporate finance partner at CBHC and has, using mergers, recruitment, training and marketing, made a concerted effort to transform the company. He claims that the result is an accountancy firm that thinks in a far more entrepreneurial and lateral way than its competitors.

"I'd just had enough of the poor, dull service offered by so many accountants who simply crunch numbers," he explains. "In the past I worked as a management accountant for a large company so I was used to looking at trends and communicating with other non-accountants. I still find it very surprising that some accountants feel threatened by non-accountants understanding their work—I think it's crucial."

White maintains that you can be the best accountant in the world but if you can't explain to people what you do, and why, you're missing a trick, which is why when he's recruiting new staff, he's less concerned by whether they've spent years in a City firm and more with their personality.

"It goes without saying that qualifications are very important but we're also looking for people who know how to talk to clients. We work with entrepreneurs who like to deal with interesting, like-minded people who can think outside of the box so people with a bit of life experience who have worked in other industries too are also very valuable."

This broad base of experience is particularly important because White is determined that CBHC should offer more than just the basics of accounting.

"Obviously you need to do the traditional work as well, but there are a lot of changes that have freed up time. Advances in IT systems and software mean that much of the routine work is now automated. Even the smallest companies have SAGE or a similar system in place that could make accountants redundant unless they are prepared to adapt."

His solution is to take a more pro-active role in the way that clients run their businesses. Getting involved with things like profit forecasts and business intelligence is the sort of added value that he has in mind, and he feels that for SMEs who might not have someone internally who can take on this sort of role, this is particularly important.

"To a certain extent we are in a position to offer smaller companies the sort of role that an in-house finance director would, rather than just the basic service. Obviously, we're still auditing, so there are limits to what we can do, but especially at times like this, I think this sort of approach is particularly important.

"Not only do clients want value for money but if they come to us with cashflow problems, they want us to offer solutions, whether that's looking at how their price structure compares to competitors or looking at merge opportunities that there might be for them. It's about more than just churning out a P&L balance sheet and it's that added value that, when times are tough, is the difference between making a living and making a profit."


The financier
Jeremy Furniss, Livingstone Partners

Jeremy Furniss is a partner at Livingstone Partners, an investment banking boutique specialising in M&A, and deals ranging from the £10m to £100m+ mark. While he is very aware that the term 'boutique' has become increasingly fashionable over the last few years, as a result of the credit crunch and a mistrust of the larger investment banks, he believes that what he calls 'the DNA' of Livingstone sets the business apart from its competitors.

"Most boutiques tend to try and ape the big banks because they think it will give them credibility. There seems to be a need to pretend to be bigger and more established than they really are. So step into their offices and you're going to find imposing oak-panelled meeting rooms and a firm that looks like a smaller version of Goldman Sachs," says Furniss.

"We're not like that. Our partners aren't just accountants, they're drawn from the law and industry, too. We've never had a City office, we've always been in the West End, and if you step into our office, just off the Strand, you'll find something that's more akin to an ad agency."

This ad agency culture is replicated in the way that it communicates with its clients. Its last Christmas card had the partners dressed up as Christmas puddings and elves while this year, clients will receive a 'Billy Banker' bar of chocolate, which, in one instance will contain a golden ticket for a trip away. Similarly, clients waiting for their lawyers to thrash out the last minute details of a deal are presented with a booklet entitled Beating Completion Boredom, which contains tongue in cheek games such as 'Hang the Lawyer', a version of the word game hangman.

"Without ever compromising our professionalism or integrity, we want to introduce some levity into what we do," says Furniss. "Of course, we can be the pin-striped man if our clients need us to be, and we can integrate with a large, established company as a bolt-on corporate finance team, but we like to think we have a personality that is quite unique within this industry," he says.

And, given the shift in the profile of its clients over recent years, you can see why such an approach is invaluable. "Thirty years ago people selling their businesses would have been people who'd spent a lifetime building them up. Now entrepreneurs are making more money sooner, tax changes mean they're incentivised to sell off their businesses earlier, and people are far more likely to build three businesses in 30 years, rather than just one.

"As a result, while on one hand we're dealing with selling businesses that have been in a family for two generations, on the other we're dealing with creative clients who have made a fortune from video games and, at 27, have their first Ferrari and think they're a rock star. As an agile and creative company, we're well suited to address both ends of that scale."