In Conversation with…
Lee Curtis
Lee Curtis of Simmons & Simmons on why it’s a great time for non-lawyers in the legal market; why lawyers need to get over themselves if they believe “sales” is beneath them, and how we’d all do well to stop being so precious and look outside the walls of our ivory towers. He spoke (refreshingly) to Centrum editor David Leck
In Conversation with…
Lee Curtis
Lee Curtis of Simmons & Simmons on why it’s a great time for non-lawyers in the legal market; why lawyers need to get over themselves if they believe “sales” is beneath them, and how we’d all do well to stop being so precious and look outside the walls of our ivory towers. He spoke (refreshingly) to Centrum editor David Leck
Q. Your role at Simmons & Simmons is quite rare. Can you give us an overview but also a flavour of how it’s changed since you joined the firm seven years ago?
One of the fantastic things about my time at Simmons is that I’ve had the opportunity to perform three very different roles which has kept things interesting. I started life out in Asia running marketing and business development for the region, a generalist role in a very different culture where I learned a lot about multitasking. The boss then dragged me back to London to run the global clients and sectors team. That role was much more about coordinating our global efforts, delivering a seamless international experience, and working with the management to deliver our sector-based go-to market strategy. Then, two and a half years ago, I spotted an opportunity to be very much more client facing and sell the firm's suite of digital products and subscription services directly to clients.
What I’ve observed during my tenure at Simmons is a growing recognition of the skills and capabilities non lawyers can provide to the firm in a client facing capacity. In my case, it was sales (the dirty word). But I've also seen a much greater emphasis placed on client relationship management, pricing, and commercial negotiations as well as the delivery of alternative legal services such as flexible resourcing, data science and legal design.
Q. It seems professional services and, in particular, the skills non-lawyers bring to it have and are changing, if not by choice, then by necessity. Surely this makes for an exciting time in developing and nurturing that new wave of skills?
Personally, I think it’s a brilliant time to start a career in law as a non-lawyer. Why? Because they NEED us! The market is increasingly saturated and the differentiation levers are becoming increasingly difficult to identify. Excellent client service is one of those differentiators. The pandemic accelerated client requests for different delivery models, from the use of collaboration tools such as MS Teams and Slack or WeChat in China, to provision of advice not via email or traditional documents but through access to digital platforms and/or through APIs.
To deliver excellent client service across any industry requires a multi-disciplinary team with different skills and capabilities. Take the restaurant industry for example. If the waiting staff are fantastic but the chef is awful you will not be going back anytime soon. Law is just the same. If the advice delivered is superb but it takes three weeks for the firm to clear you for AML and conflicts, or you receive marketing emails that bear no relevance to the job you do then your overall client experience is damaged.
There is a definite recognition within the industry law firms can benefit from the skills and revenue generating capabilities non lawyers can provide and the overall service delivered to clients. Whether that’s in the marketing and business development team through advanced client relationship management, digital marketing, and advertising, or whether it’s the alternative delivery mechanisms for the legal services themselves, which incorporate data science and engineering. There is scope to broaden the skill set and capabilities within a law firm that don’t require a law degree. And how do we best develop those new skills within ourselves? And in the teams for which we're responsible?
Law has traditionally been a very stuffy industry but I think if you look around other organisations and industries the skills that are required to take law to the next level are there in abundance. I feel it's very important in the legal industry that we stop being so precious and look outside the walls of our ivory tower.
“Even today I speak to some newly qualified lawyers who give off an air of superiority - and that sales is somehow beneath them. Frankly, it’s ridiculous and they should get over themselves.”
Q. And how do we best develop those new skills within ourselves and in the teams for which we’re responsible?
I think the first stage is to accept there is a skills gap between what we have today and what we need for the future. When looking ahead there also needs to be a recognition the way in which legal (and perhaps professional) services are being sold today also needs to be reconsidered. Take my area of legal product sales for example. I require hundreds of thousands of eyeballs to view my products and fill the top of my sales funnel to qualify my leads and make sales. That requires, amongst other things, digital advertising, a concept that is still nascent in a lot of our industry.
Once this analysis has been completed, I believe the composition of teams needs to be reimagined to understand where people should be focussing their energy for most ROI. As a cost centre within the business, we also need to face facts and start to actively consider how to overlay technology solutions to (part) automate many of the lower-level things we do daily. This might sound scary and like headcount reduction but, conducted in the right way, I can see huge benefits in identifying new and exciting roles for marketing and business development teams around the world as well as increasing employee morale by automating menial and boring tasks such as the dreaded marketing list creation, basic pitch, experience collation and so on.
Q. Your Linkedin profile is titled “digitising cross border regulation”. Tell us more?
My current role basically involves selling the firm's suite of digital products and subscription-based services. We've done well as a firm to leverage our strengths in cross border regulation through the application of technology, allowing us to surface large volumes of frequently asked cross border regulatory questions to subscribers via a digital platform enabling them to answer these questions instantly and in a cost-effective way. The information is constantly updated, meaning expensive legal memos are not required when a particular regulation changes.
For those readers old enough to remember, it’s the difference between having the Encyclopaedia Britannia collection sat on your bookshelf or having access to Google.
Q. And I was struck by the refreshing opening to your biography – “I sell lawyers”. In an ever-complex business world, you clearly feel there’s a need to (at least on occasions) cut through the c**p and just spell it (and the benefits) out?
Spot on. My experience over the past 19 years is that lawyers are not very good at selling themselves or others. This is not their fault as it forms almost no part of their professional training and, let’s face it, it’s not a part of the role that attracted most lawyers to the profession. As a forward-looking firm, Simmons has recognised their lawyers need some help in the sales and relationship development areas.
Two other general traits exist within lawyers they must overcome to be strong salespeople. One is an aversion to risk. Whilst this is an important trait to address in the legal sphere, this risk tolerance needs to be recalibrated when it comes to sales and relationship management. For example, my experience of pitching any idea to an internal legal team usually ends up with a list of reasons why we cannot do something rather than why we can. Even more pitches in my career have finished with a request for yet more lists or irrelevant analysis required prior to actually getting on with things! This desire to reduce the risk to what, in my view, are impossible levels, creates significant lags in bringing ideas to market.
The second trait is fragility or a fear of rejection or being wrong. In any industry across the globe, at a basic level, sales fill the top of the funnel, qualifying your leads down and making sales. This process means that A LOT of people will say “no” to you! Time and time again through my career I have seen this fear of rejection paralyse senior legal practitioners into inaction as they would rather not know or deflect rather than be rejected. Again, on an individual level, this inaction leads to delays in the process and clogs up the sales funnel with a lot of “pending” outcomes we all know are lost but are too afraid to admit.
A large part of my role at Simmons is to increase the confidence of practitioners in basic sales methodology and support their egos when we do not get the right decision.
Q. Is “sales” still a dirty word with some lawyers?
Yes. Even today I speak to some newly qualified lawyers who give off an air of superiority, and that sales is beneath them. Frankly, it’s ridiculous and they should get over themselves.
“I have seen the silos break down between IT, finance, HR, and marketing. It has gone from fighting over who was the most important to being collaborative and working together to bring the separate data sets together to give holistic client intelligence.”
“My experience of pitching any idea to an internal legal team usually ends up with a list of reasons why we cannot do something rather than why we can. Even more pitches in my career have finished with a request for yet more lists or irrelevant analysis required prior to actually getting on with things!”
Q. How do you prioritize research when selling legal products and subscription-based services, and what role does it play in your marketing and business development strategy?
Research is crucial because it helps us understand our target audience, identify their pain points, and develop solutions that meet their needs. We prioritize research by conducting customer surveys, market analysis, and competitor research. This helps us create targeted marketing campaigns, improve our product offerings, and make data-driven business decisions. By investing in research, we can stay ahead of the competition, provide value to our customers, and grow our business.
Q. I’ve asked this question of another guest this issue but I think it’s important. If you accept sales, marketing and business development professionals relish being creative, how do you feel we best preserve and enhance professional creativity in a world in which AI, ChatGPT and the like might be perceived as taking away the “fun” bits of our roles?
AI will change the world over the next five to 10 years. Fact. From my perspective we therefore need to find ways in which we can coexist with generative AI like Chat GPT. By way of example, we created a Chat GPT prompt as part of this interview which asked for a question and answer related to the topic in question. Can you guess which one it is?
Personally, I am excited about the opportunities these technologies present for the work we do. I find their abilities to provide quality first drafts of marketing collateral akin to putting on a work exoskeleton. It supercharges your ability to be incredibly effective and cover significantly more ground using less effort through the combination of human ingenuity (after all, you still need to provide the correct ideas and prompts to Chat GPT for it to work effectively) and computing power (access to literally millions of precedents, ideas, and topics in real time).
Specifically in my sales role, I see a future in which initial sales requests are answered by a sophisticated AI engine which the customer does not necessarily know is a computer. Think this is farfetched? Look at what Google are doing with their AI assistant as far back 2018. Does that make me worried about my own future? Yes, a little. However, my view is that generative AI could be harnessed to take literally thousands of leads simultaneously and qualify them down the sales pipeline so that my time is better spent on those leads that require the building of trust, credibility, and intimacy[1] to close the deal, something that a computer cannot do…….yet!
Q. You’ve spent time working in Asia and we have many international readers and affiliates. Can you tell us a little about that experience?
Sure. I spent six years in Sydney from 2008. I then spent five in Hong Kong, coming back to London eventually in 2018. Working on two different continents has significant benefits and I would strongly encourage anyone who has the opportunity to travel with their work to grab it with both hands. Not only do you get to experience different cultures, different people, and different ways of working but it really opens your mind and understanding to the fantastic variety that exists across the world.
In my own sphere this extends to the way in which sales, marketing and business development activities must align with the local audiences. In Asia, for example, much more emphasis is placed on building the relationship over time - the hard sell does not work. Conversely, in the Netherlands, the Dutch are much more direct and want you to get straight to the point quickly. Again, building a knowledge and understanding of your client base internationally is critical to adapting your style to best suit your customers.
Q. The theme of this issue is research and the evaluation and implementation of that research. I imagine as a “sales” man there’s little need to ask you about the huge important of robust and appropriate client or sector-specific data?
Exactly. Fail to prepare, prepare to fail is the old Armed Forces quote that is simple yet powerful. As I’ve mentioned now on several occasions we're operating in a very, very saturated market. And the margin for differentiation is incredibly small.
In legal services we already collect a large amount of data about our customers. However, compared to our counterparts in the FMCG and tech sectors I think there is a long way for the industry to go until we can truly understand our customers and their buying preferences.
Take customer feedback for example. When I buy a new television, change energy providers, or subscribe to a new streaming service I am constantly asked about the services provided using short surveys, follow up nurture campaigns, and AI driven chatbots. This information is used to drive the all-important Net Promotor Score (NPS), the transparent and open metric by which all service and consumer led organisations live or die.
This is in stark contrast to large parts of Big Law which still places importance on opaque legal directories rankings that are out of date as soon as they are published. We have a long way to go in this industry if we are to become truly customer centric and using the data we capture effectively to influence our future customer led offerings.
Q. It’s the topic of our next issue but I wondered if you had any thoughts on workplace culture as you posted recently in support of someone who was calling on us all to play our role in mental wellbeing. Have you any further thoughts on this or on things such as hybrid working, talent shortages, and developing young talent?
That’s a massive question with two overlapping topics that I cannot possibly do justice to in a few sentences. On workplace culture I think we need to carefully consider the impact a 100 per cent virtual environment has on organisational glue and corporate identity. More emphasis and investment needs placed on identifying mechanisms to bring people together physically to interact on a more human level and get to know each other off screen.
On mental wellbeing we collectively need to do all we can to smash the stigma that I still believe exists in corporate cultures regarding mental health, especially amongst males. In addition to this I think there is massive scope to increase the resilience of our people through training and discussions on mental wellbeing.
Q. It’s been a torrid few years and yet we’ve seen and continue to see many examples of firms, businesses and inspiring individuals who’ve really taken hold of the mantra “every problem is an opportunity”. What is it that inspires and motivates you each morning?
Put simply - winning. Whether that is closing a sale, convincing a partner or associate to get out of their comfort zone or managing to get my four-year old off to school with the right clothes on, I love winning!
[1] David Maister’s trust equation - https://trustedadvisor.com/why-trust-matters/understanding-trust/understanding-the-trust-equation
Snap Shot
2020 -
Head of Global Sales Simmons & Simmons 2018 - 2020
Global Head of Clients & Sectors Simmons & Simmons 2016 – 2017
Head of Marketing & Business Development (Asia) Simmons & Simmons
2013 - 2016 Asia Pacific Client Focus Manager Clifford Chance
2008 – 2013
Business Development Manager/Head of Special Projects Clayton Utz (Sydney)
Getting to Know You
Best bit of advice you’ve been given?
Never give up. Ever. Best bit of advice you’d give someone at the start of their career?
Have fun. You spend a large proportion of your life at work. If you’re not enjoying it, find something else to do. Be yourself. Stick to what you’re good at and surround yourself with other people who have different skills and who you can learn from.
What led you to this career?
A combination of dumb luck (answered a job ad for a company I didn’t even know at the time was a law firm – it was A&O!) and upbringing (my dad was - and still is buying and selling stuff; guess I just followed suit!) Best holiday destination?
Somewhere with no internet (https://alexonthemap.com/internet-free-vacation/)
Favourite pastime?
Spending time with my two young kids. It is so refreshing to speak to these little people who have zero filter and are curious about EVERYTHING!