Orlagh Kelly: Vincent Denham, Chambers Director at 42BR Barristers, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for hosting us in your beautiful new building in Staple Inn. I know that you have just moved here recently. What was the motivation to move from the eponymous 42 Bedford Row, and with the consequential brand change that would have to happen?

Vincent Denham: I think as much as anything it was the fact that while the old building was beautiful from the outside, it just didn't work inside. It was full of staircases and corridors and lots of very small rooms, whereas what we really needed was a space that was more agile and could be used for multiple purposes. Hospitality for clients, hot desking and bigger library spaces for barristers and staff who perhaps aren't in every day, and just a better use of the space. More people in a smaller space.

Orlagh Kelly: And do you think then that how a barristers' chambers operates in this modern 2024 world is different to 30 years ago, even as much as the type of space that you need is different?

Vincent Denham: I think so. People talk about the pandemic as being some kind of watershed in relation to work habits and so on. Barristers have always, in my experience at the bar, worked from home. They've always had some sort of facility to work other than in chambers. But I think what has happened is that people are now coming in for shorter periods. Rather than coming in and staying all day, they're coming in for a couple of hours and they want to come in and either get ready for court or come in after court. And it doesn't always mean that they want to work either — they want to come in and perhaps socialise a little bit with people that they've not seen for a long time. So the sort of space that we want has to reflect that kind of use.

Orlagh Kelly: And of course, with the area that we're in, beautiful legal London, there must be planning permission restrictions, listed building issues. Have you run into any of those?

Vincent Denham: We developed a very, very close and affectionate relationship with the lady in the City of London planning department. Because this is a listed building — despite that it's a relatively modern structure on the outside, it is still listed — there have been a number of challenges around some of the stuff that we wanted to do inside. But we got there.

Orlagh Kelly: You got there. What could you not have? I'm curious.

Vincent Denham: Because it's effectively a straight, narrow building, we couldn't put curves in. We wanted to put a number of curved glazed spaces in that we couldn't. So we now don't have those. We've got squares.

Orlagh Kelly: And so, I mean, you know I've known you for a long time and I'm aware, but for the purposes of our audience — working at the bar and within the bar is not your first profession, you've worked elsewhere. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that before we move into the next segment?

Vincent Denham: Sure. I didn't go to university. I spent two or three years working in a management training programme at a big bank and ended up working in retail finance for 20 years. And then came to the bar — or to the legal profession, not just the bar but the legal profession — as a second career, pretty much.

Orlagh Kelly: What was the difference in moving from that more financial services world into what some would possibly describe — particularly some years ago — as a more traditional profession? Did you notice anything different?

Vincent Denham: I suppose the huge difference with the bar is that you're dealing with people who are self-employed. We don't have shareholders, we don't have the imperative of making a profit. We have a surplus but we don't call it profit. And having shareholders working in the business rather than being on the outside of it — I suppose that's the fundamental difference. And in a way that was what was attractive.

Orlagh Kelly: And so when you first moved into the profession, I believe you're the first chief executive ever to be appointed in and around the bar, which is quite an achievement. I don't know if you knew what you were letting yourself in for.

Vincent Denham: Quite an achievement still to be doing it. Yeah, I was the first — I think the legislation uses the expression non-lawyer, which I don't really like — but I was the first professional manager, if you will, at the Senate Chambers of St Philip's in Birmingham.

Orlagh Kelly: Okay, and yeah, how was that? How did that feel?

Vincent Denham: It was terrific. In a way, what we were trying to do was to put — as you've just referred to — a business structure around something that wasn't really a business. So on the one hand, if you aggregate a chambers' fee income, it can be several or many millions of pounds, comparable with a law firm. But effectively the business is really only the operating business that employs the staff, that runs the premises and that kind of thing, which is still millions, but very, very small millions compared with the turnover. So the business is actually 100 or 120 or 130 barristers all aggregated into one, and that's the difficult bit.

Orlagh Kelly: It's certainly a business structure that most people outside of the industry would find it hard to wrap their heads around — that where you would look at, for example, there's a potential turnover of 40 million but in reality the operations have to run off maybe one or two million.

Vincent Denham: Yeah, I think that's probably true. In theory and on paper, it shouldn't work. And I think that's the... it was the same 25 years ago and it is now. But it does work. It really does work.

Orlagh Kelly: And so, I mean, the first thing to think about is there are a lot of masters in there in the sense that if you've got a hundred barristers or two hundred barristers who all have an opinion about how things should be run, that must add a little bit of complexity in terms of decision-making.

Vincent Denham: I think if you allow it. Part of the change process — and certainly part of the change process that I went through and took St Philip's through years and years ago — was the fact that in order to get to where they want to be professionally, they have to relinquish a degree of control of their business. So you actually gain control of your business by giving up control of your business to people who are competent to run it on your behalf. So it's not about, for example, when I got to St Philip's, we had board meetings about what brand of photocopier we would lease next time around when the lease came to an end. We wouldn't think of doing that now and I'm sure they wouldn't think of doing that now. But that was the level of decision-making that happened at group level. So I think it was about persuading intelligent and highly motivated individuals that they should focus on their job; being lawyers and doing good work and growing their practices and making more money by allowing me and my team to do what we did.

Orlagh Kelly: Yeah, absolutely. And so what I think — and have been thinking about in advance of our conversation today — is that this is almost a masterclass on how to run a professional set of chambers in the modern world. And I'm very keen to glean all of the things that you've learned along the way and the things that you have done that have made that change into running such a fabulously modern and effective and profitable chambers — I know you don't use the word profit, but it is a successful chambers, to be fair, in whatever metric you want to use. Award winning, to say the least.

And so what, if you can think through your journey — either this set or some of the other sets that you've been at — what have you done that has brought that success? What changes did you implement or ethos did you introduce?

Vincent Denham: I don't think it's any one ethos. I think it's learning to speak in the language of the people, or the individual, that you're talking with. So for example, here at 42 we are a multidisciplinary set. We have a strong family group, we have a strong business and property group and yet their two markets are quite different. So it's about talking to those people in a language that makes sense to them as a group and indeed as individuals within that group, and then explaining how things or showing them in colour rather than in black and white how things could be for them. I think the essence of a modern set of chambers for me is to be cooperatively competitive. So we have strong practice groups with standards for membership, standards for behaviour, standards for performance and so on. And it is perfectly feasible, perfectly reasonable for them to expect to be in court against each other at four o'clock and yet be in a meeting in this room at six o'clock talking about how we can go and get more work from a particular firm of solicitors.

Orlagh Kelly: Yeah, and again, that's quite a different way of working where you're opponents at one part of the day and then colleagues for the rest of the time. And that is something that I think a lot of people who are non-lawyers typically struggle with understanding. How can you work in that adversarial context and then leave that behind in the courtroom? But it is something I guess it's learned, it's a skill that barristers have to master.

Vincent Denham: I think it's something that they learn very early on in their career as pupils. Particularly in family work, where you have a number of barristers instructed for different parties. You could have mother, father, guardian, intervener and local authority. It is not beyond the realms of possibility for four or five of those barristers to be from the same chambers. So it's something that happens regularly.

Orlagh Kelly: Yeah. And so one of the things that strikes me, thinking about the fact that you came in as the first non-lawyer manager but also with that name, Chief Executive, traditionally chambers were run by senior clerks who really earned their stripes, worked from the bottom up, learned everything inside and out. And there must have been some rancour around someone just being put in, or how did you manage that? It seems to me that there would have been the potential for a clash.

Vincent Denham: There was. I mean, it wasn't all plain sailing. Step back a little bit. I think this job, whether it's dealing with barristers who are motivated people or dealing with staff, you can only do it by consent. You have to achieve a degree of consensus with the people that you're working with. And also, my management cliché, picking your battles, deciding what you're going to die in a ditch over and what you're not going to fight too hard about. What can be left until further down the track, if you will. Clerking, 30 years ago, before that, before I got into the job, worked in a very different way. Barristers' clerks were generally paid on commission rather than on a salary. They took a percentage of every fee note that was issued and some clerks were earning significantly more than their barristers were. And that was a situation that really couldn't sustain itself and it needed to be changed. And also, when compared with the modern circumstances, where you think about work allocation and fairness of distribution, I don't like the word corrupt, but the clerking process could have been seen as corrupt in the sense that work comes in and it was up to the clerk to decide who got that particular piece of work, and that could be open to all sorts of interruption and interference.

So it makes more sense to have a professional management team around that with transparent processes in place that make it very clear how things are done and barristers and staff can see how those things are done. But to go back to the original question, there was a fair degree of rancour certainly at the beginning.

When I got to St Philip's, I had two of everything. I had two senior clerks, I had two fees teams, I had two clerks' rooms, because St Philip's was a result of a merger between two sets in Birmingham. But by communicating with people effectively and by saying, we need one of those, not two, we had a competition in accordance with employment law and we ended up with the structure that we did. Was everybody happy? Probably not. But did we do it fairly? Yes.

Orlagh Kelly: And how do you typically bring people along with you on the journey? Because it's something that you mentioned that you can't just tell them how it's done, you have to bring them along.

Vincent Denham: I think you find out very quickly. If you explain to people, it's a bit like a football manager going into a new team. To a point, he deals with the resources that he has — he's got the players he's got. He can't suddenly change his centre forward because he doesn't like the way he does certain things. He may make a plan to change them later, but for the time being he's got to deal with what he's got. So it's about coaching and leading that individual into thinking slightly differently. Ultimately, if they don't want to, then they don't want to, and then you make a change. But you end up with a team, hopefully, that is a bit of a compromise sometimes, but it's doing roughly the things that you want it to be doing.

Orlagh Kelly: And so speaking of compromise — you and I have talked about this before, but the change that COVID brought in around the potential for remote working opportunities. You obviously indicated barristers can always work from home, and that's something that I did when I was a practising barrister, I had that ability to do it. So it was no big deal to me whenever that was introduced during COVID. But I appreciate people who typically had been office-bound Monday to Friday with long commutes and expensive journeys found a new way of working, an opportunity to create a bit of balance. And that moved from completely in-office working in early March 2020 to five days a week at home, and people had to figure that out during lockdowns and so on. But in that post-lockdown world, where this concept has been introduced, what are your thoughts on remote working and the ability to be productive and be part of a team?

Vincent Denham: I think it's about trust. I think it's about recognising that individuals can deliver decent work if they're allowed to and if they're in their own environment and they work successfully like that. My doubts come from a team-building perspective. The clerks' room, or the practice managers' structure in our circumstances — it's wrong to say it's hierarchical, but it is certainly based on levels of experience and levels of ability and levels of training. And you don't learn the next step up from your bedroom. Yes, you can do stuff in the diary. Yes, you can make phone calls to solicitors and your colleagues and book in cases and so on. But what you can't do is learn from the people that are next to you, more senior to you in the team. So I suppose I've mellowed slightly — we've had this conversation before — I've mellowed slightly simply because society has changed and the workforce has changed. And every time we've recruited somebody since 2020, the first question is: how many days a week can I spend at home? And if I say none — which I did do and probably still am inclined to do for certain jobs — then they say, well, the job's not for me. On the one hand, you can say, well, that will lead you to a team that you really want, because you'll end up with people who do want to be in and are committed and so on. But on the other hand, you probably miss out on some people who would otherwise be good additions.

We're moving to a situation now where people can work from home on a rota basis in all of the clerking team, but they won't be at home for more than a day every six or seven days. And everybody's in on a particular day, so there's a day in the week when we know everybody is in — so we can have team meetings or give them training or whatever it happens to be. And if things like holidays or sickness interfere, then the home working stops and everybody comes in. The needs of the business and barristers and clients come first. Absolutely first.

So I've softened a little bit, but not as far as some people wanted me to. I've got to adapt.

Orlagh Kelly: I appreciate what you're saying. I've always had that opportunity to work from home but I would find that and I can speak only for myself, really, that having a long day where I have a lot to do and no one around me to kind of bounce off, or have that sort of intrinsic socialness, I don't find that I end up being that productive. I think that I will be, but I can get easily distracted.

Vincent Denham: Well, I think that — and you're right and that is still my concern that you spend a lot of time on your own. And even having your lunch on your own, your sandwich on your own, going for a walk on your own, it can be very, very lonely. Going back to the lockdown experience, I remember one of the things we did first off, because it was new for everybody — nobody had been in this situation before — we set up six o'clock Zoom calls on a Friday so everybody would have a drink, a beer or something, in front of them. And then you'd see people — and I was lucky, I lived in a nice house in the country and I had an office and a study, I could go and be quiet and do my thing. But a lot of people were living in their bedroom, and you could tell they were in their bedroom because they hadn't made the bed. It was just — how can you work in that kind of environment? But again going back to trust, you've got to let them.

For everybody in my team who wants to spend time at home, there's another one who says, actually, I work better when I'm in the building.

Orlagh Kelly: Absolutely, very good. And so when we're talking about the success of chambers, and we've chatted about a couple of different things that you've done — is there anything else that comes to mind, for anyone who's listening, around things they could start doing in their own set that might help with their success, elevate what they're doing? Anything else that you do that you think might be interesting to our audience?

Vincent Denham: I don't know — look, there are plenty of people doing this job who are working in complex sets of chambers and who are doing it very successfully. So I think the world has moved on since 1998 when I started. I suppose I would say that my innate style has always been to allow people to self-direct. So if I have a team of people, my start point is: let them find their own level. Let them find which team roles most appropriately suit them, and let's look at the output. And if I need to get involved in changing things, I will. But self-directed teams is probably the way I've always tried to manage and always tried to work with.

Orlagh Kelly: That allows people of course to take ownership for their own success and feel more bought in, I think, than being micromanaged.

Vincent Denham: Yeah. I'm giving them permission to fail. Going back to the traditional — I keep going back to St Philip's — but when I first came to the bar, I had the best time of my life at St Philip's. I really, really had a great time with some terrific people who I still call friends — the heads of chambers and others who I still have dinner with. But they, I was given permission to use their first names.

So when I got there, you can call me John because if there was such a thing as a QC as it was then, in management, at your level of experience and in your job, you would be a QC so you can call me by my first name. What else would I call you?

I grew out of calling people Mr or Mrs years ago. So that sort of thing still worked in those chambers. But it also is the case that in these chambers, some of the more senior clerks — as opposed to the juniors — don't use first names for some of the barristers. They use their initials. So in fact, my director of clerking, Steve, would not call our head of chambers by their first name — he'd use their initials. Whereas the office junior uses a first name.

Orlagh Kelly: You can see the generational change, literally.

Vincent Denham: Yeah, which is societal — that's just the way that society is now. Whether that's a good thing or not, I don't know. But I would say I just let people exploit their potential. My job exists to enable barristers and staff to be the best they can be. So it's my job to get out of the way and let them be that.

Orlagh Kelly: One of the things that I wanted to ask you about is the relationship that must exist between yourself as Chambers Director — which you are in this role — and the head of chambers, who is on occasion, I guess — and I'm not talking about Tina specifically — but is essentially the face of the business. They've probably grown up through the chambers, in some cases from pupillage, but their expertise and abilities are typically very centred towards different things than running a business. So how does that relationship work, and work so well as it does in your case?

Vincent Denham: I think it starts off from the basis of trust. If you demonstrate, coming into the job, that you're not going to make silly decisions and you're not going to be unreliable — if you will — then there's a tendency, particularly if you have a busy practice, which Tina does, to just let you get on with it. But Tina and I know where our responsibilities are. She is very much the head of chambers. She's responsible for the regulatory compliance and all of that. It's my job to make sure that she is protected in that sense. But it's my job to run the business and to make sure that we are growing in the areas that we need to grow in, we're recruiting the right kind of people, that we're developing our clerking teams and so on. But also that she knows that I'm doing it in the way that she would herself do it if she were here to do it, if that makes sense. And I tend to use the word pastoral — she has a strong pastoral sense of us being, on the one hand in my world, a fairly gung-ho, go-for-it set of chambers in the old description, but also doing it in the right way, in a way that is in line with our values. So she's the custodian of the values and I'm the custodian of the business development and growth and the business sense, if you will.

Orlagh Kelly: One of the things that was really energising and rewarding for her was being able to identify ways to help other people bring their career forward — that was something that I don't know is necessarily evident when you're on your own career pathway, that actually there can be a lot of reward from helping others follow you. I know that that's something that she takes particular interest in, and you've literally just reflected that ethos yourself — so it's inbuilt into the DNA of 42.

Vincent Denham: Yeah, we work very closely together, I think, and the fact that it's lasted so long for both of us is testament to that. I would say that in a way, that's how we are structured — and a lot of chambers are structured in practice groups — but you make those practice groups almost mini businesses. The head of the group is like the managing director of that family, and they are responsible for the balance sheet, the P&L, the business development activity and the acquisition of talent and so on to do that. And I think that then almost genuinely builds a career and a group approach to career development rather than simply being a bunch of self-employed individuals.

Orlagh Kelly: What's interesting about that is that I think you have maybe given away a little bit of your secret sauce — because not a lot of sets of chambers run their areas of law as almost their own little business within the bigger brand, I would suggest. I mean, I can think of a couple of sets that do that and are also very successful. But the thought that you have people who are MD of that practice area, and the amount of ownership that comes with that — typically in this world, you know, what's the phrase, people are walking in dead men's shoes if they happen to be second to a senior clerk who is still quite young and is potentially going to stay forever. But actually what you've done there is, by giving the practice areas their own MD, you've really created almost business owners, and there must be quite an opportunity to develop their own skill sets as business owners with some level of protection from the top from yourselves. But that's quite an exciting opportunity, probably, for the professionals in chambers — that maybe hasn't always been available.

Vincent Denham: That's probably right. I don't want to call us a law firm, but it's making ourselves as close to being a law firm as the rules allow and as people want to be. I mean, a lot of the reason a lot of people come to the bar is because they don't want to be partners in a law firm, and I get that, and I don't want to turn them into it. But equally, by joining us, it's very clear when we do recruit new members that they're joining something — a group of people who are motivated to grow not just their practice but also their practice group. Because by growing the group... I mean, the old way of the bar was probably a barrister going to the clerk saying, what work have you got for me today? The focus was on the size of the slice of the cake. My perspective is: let's grow the cake. Let's have more ingredients. Let's make a bigger cake. Then everybody gets more. And that then creates jobs, it creates work, it creates opportunity.

Orlagh Kelly: Very good, well it's working very well for you.

Vincent Denham: Well, so far. It's about time.

Orlagh Kelly: So far you say. So what does the future look like? What would you like for 42BR in the next five to ten years?

Vincent Denham: Gosh. I'd quite like — I want us to keep growing in our areas of strength, not for the sake of it. We don't need to grow for the sake of it and I'm not interested in growing for the sake of it. But we want to recruit new members who share our values and who share the ambition to be part of something like this. We also want to do increasingly good work for good law firms, local authorities and other institutions — and also to be recognised for that. There's a lot of — probably less so now than there was before — but there is sometimes disparaging talk about multidisciplinary sets of chambers not being sufficiently focused. But I think the way that we use the practice groups and create business units out of those practice groups — and give them their own business plan, their own marketing activity, their own budgeting process and so on — that enables them to compete in their market with more specialist sets.

Orlagh Kelly: So you've somewhat cracked that potential issue of getting too big and lacking agility, by virtue of creating the practice groups and having the...

Vincent Denham: I think so. We're pretty agile. I mean, getting into this building within a year was pretty agile. That was quite good — making the decision to come, finding the space, getting it designed and built within two years was pretty cool.

Orlagh Kelly: Congratulations, it's a beautiful space. Very good. Well, listen, thank you so much for your time and your expertise. I'm sure lots of people will be listening and taking notes.

Vincent Denham: I hope so.

Orlagh Kelly: You've given me a few ideas actually as well. I'm always thinking about business rather than anything to do with law. So thank you, it's been great and I'll talk to you again soon.

Vincent Denham: All the best.