Alberto Saravalle

We had a surprise visitor from Milan this week, as Bonelli Erede Pappalardo senior partner Alberto Saravalle was unexpectedly called to London on client business. A perfect opportunity to line up some (very last minute) journalist meetings with national and legal press. So my treat was to spend half a day with this fascinating man.

Continental elite firm Bonelli is an international law firm that happens to be head-quartered in Italy, and although Italian by birth, Alberto is very much a 'global citizen'. Born and educated in Italy, he also studied both at Cambridge and at Yale, lived in Paris for a few years, also in New York where he still has a base, (and is licensed to practise at the New York Bar). He is a world class corporate and capital markets lawyer, but what struck me most in my conversations with Alberto were his views on the importance for lawyers - indeed anyone in a demanding business role - of having a hinterland, a life outside of work and an emphasis on one's own humanity.

His own interests are varied - from extreme sports, to film, to music and to fine art.  Also, in addition to his capital markets practice, he has an unusual specialism in art law, renown as the 'go to guy' (as The Times' Edward Fennell put it) on issues relating to the restoration of artworks after illegal sales - something that the world's major museums, particularly in the US, now realise they should resist. But most of all you see Alberto's philosophy in his descriptions of how he and other senior partners at Bonelli design the professional development and employee engagement programmes at the firm.

"I believe that with any business person who is at the top of his/her game, you will find they are so much more than a perfect technician, smart negotiator etc. They will be a powerful human being as well; the sort of person everyone's attention turns to when they enter a room, who clearly has a lot to say not just on matters of business - for that reason, a person of whom others are always keen to know what's in their mind.."

I can certainly think of a number of clients for whom this is true.  But is this how I see leaders in business, the City and politics generally?  Hmm.  I'm not so sure.  But it's certainly my view of Alberto.

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The wheels of the legal and regulatory machinery are certainly back in motion after the Summer recess. We had the MoJ give us the referral fees ban last week, followed this Monday by the Vickers Report, then later in the week we had more big banking litigation with the news the UK is now suing The European Central Bank over a regulatory change that would be prejudicial to the UK banking community. This week we also saw the brakes slammed on the Law Commission's review of cohabitation rights.

Family law is already so far behind the reality of modern day family life and relationships, this review of cohabitation rights was desperately needed to bring it up to date. The ditching of the review is a massive retrograde step.

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I won't name names, but loved this media tip from the managing partner of a big City firm:  "If my phone rings in a meeting and I see it's a client, I will wait to the end of the meeting to answer; if it's a bank lender, I'll ask my secretary to say I'll call back immediately after the meeting; if it's a journalist, I'll answer the call right away".   No wonder he's such a favourite with the media!

Sue Brown

Completely out of the blue, at the end of this week the MoJ announced a ban on referral fees.  Insurers welcomed the ban, but others felt the announcement was rather at odds with the Legal Services Board's conclusion that a total ban was inappropriate, and that instead the focus should be on creating greater transparency.
Prolegal's Sue Brown happened to be at our offices while it was all kicking off, so a brilliant opportunity to get her take on the issue first hand.  Sue is a highly experienced and market-leading claimant lawyer, and has very strong views that she is not afraid to put on the record.  She believes the ban will be extremely dangerous for consumers because, she says, insurers' enthusiasm for the ban has less to do with their distaste for 'treating clients as commodities to be bought and sold', and more to do with their having spotted an opportunity to remove independent solicitors from the process altogether.  Post Online's coverage of the story lead with Sue's comments, under the banner 'Prolegal warns MoJ over dangerous referral fee decision'.  Sue is clearly a woman to be approached with caution!


Prolegal has a reputation for doing things differently and their response to the referral fees ban was no exception.  In addition to the expert comment that Sue was only too happy to provide to the press, the firm decided to commission a cartoon.  We put them in touch with nationals-and-private-Eye regular Ken Pyne who at breath-taking speed produced this gem for us.  


Check out Prolegal's new website too - a dramatic change of image indicative of their move up-market, adding a range of high-value-add legal services to their commoditised offering.


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Others had plenty to say on the ban as well, many coming from an altogether different point of view.  We were busy across the whole Kysen team placing comment from the London Solicitors Litigation Association, Parabis, and the Forum of Insurance Lawyers, who all had insightful points to make to further the debate.  


Our man Elliott here was particularly busy dealing with national and insurance press - at one point an enquiry from Channel 4 as well.  He thoroughly enjoyed himself - an exciting flurry of activity at the end of an already-busy week (or at least that's what he told me...)


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Light relief this week came in the form of Vogue Fashion's Night Out, a global event taking place in no less than 16 countries around the world including, of course, London (Covent Garden for the first time), Milan, Paris, New York.   Brilliant fun! Even though we only made it to two shops.  But when you're offered champagne, food and beauty treatments while you shop, where's the incentive to move on!  Thanks Betsey Johnson and The Sanctuary Spa!. 

Nicky Richmond

Straight-talking Nicky Richmond is a legal blogger to watch. I'd highly recommend you check out her blogs and twitter feed. Nicky is joint managing partner of boutique law firm Brecher and renown for telling it exactly as it is, whether advising clients and large-scale property finance transactions or sharing her views on the inner workings of the legal profession. Not surprisingly, clients and colleagues love Nicky for just this. You can get a taste of her inimitable style from her twitter feed, (her ID is 'saysitstraight') and her personal blog (entitled 'Saying It Straight').

What I find particularly skilful is how Nicky perfects adjusting her voice to suit different platforms. For example she blogs regularly for Estates Gazette, and these are highly entertaining reads. Take a look at this blog post about the 'Strange New Beasts' that are to be found in the property finance arena currently, and how parties looking for finance need to look in quite unusual places these days.  In addition she writes for the print edition: her blog pieces are sometimes reproduced in print, then followed by slightly more technical articles on the same topic for the professional pages, using an altogether more serious tone of voice. 

Different again is her personal blog Saying It Straight, ('as sure as eggs is eggs - food and law') where she recently wrote a hilarious piece about lawyers during 'Dog Days', being the days in August ending with the 24th 'defining a time period that is hot or stagnant, or marked by dull lack of progress'.  If you're involved in the legal profession, you'll find this amusing...

Follow Nicky and enjoy!


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International bank litigation kicked off in a big way this weekend with news that the US Federal Housing Finance Agency's has filed lawsuits against 17 foreign banks (including three in the UK) for allegedly misleading them over the quality of mortgages sold. 


Joe Lynam's piece for the BBC was masterful in its succinctness, summarising a highly complex area in a very short broadcast segment. An excellent case study in the structure and brevity of broadcast stories compared to print media.  

Watch video here.

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Exciting news for Kysen this week was our move to 22 Long Acre, in the heart of London's creative district, Covent Garden. The building we have moved to is the former headquarters of Channel 5. It's an inspiring place to work and we are all loving it.


We had some intriguing comments when we tweeted photos of the area, including some of the local street performers, and asked people to guess where we'd moved to. My favourite was in response to this photo: legal journo and academic @richardparnham tweeted 
 "I didn't know The Body Shop, or Kysen, had opened a branch in Narnia..." 
Well he does now!


My other favourite quote was from one of our staff after a client meeting on our new roof terrace:
"we need to bring in our sunglasses now we're working here."  
Not sure the English weather will allow this to become much of a problem!

Simon Edwards

Simon Edwards anticipates Somme-like slaughter

Another chap who doesn't pull his punches is Simon Edwards, proprietor of Prolegal.  Over the last six years, Simon has been building a very forward thinking legal business. Prolegal has all the good things of a traditional legal partnership - regulated advice, senior lawyers hired in from respected firms offering high-value-add in addition to commoditised services - but without the fusty business and decision-making structures that prevent so many firms from being responsive to market change and client needs:  Prolegal is a company rather than a partnership, with plans to make each practice area a separate LLP beneath the corporate umbrella, to give area heads the autonomy and flexibility to run their parts of the business as they see fit.

But you should hear him on the subject of regulation and the advent of ABSs, as I did this week. This man has very strong views!

"It's simply not a level playing field. The high level of regulation we have to comply with, and the level of insurance we have to stump up, is just a joke when you consider the new potential fly-by-nights who will be able to set up shop under an entirely different regulator and with an almost non-existent level of cover and scrutiny. We know there are people out there who think setting up a legal business is a piece of cake and who simply see the advent of ABSs as a licence to print money. They should have a very rude awakening. We are expecting a Somme-like slaughter as these business set up shop for a short stint before being closed down by the regulators - assuming of course the regulators have the resource to get round all the new entrants in the marketplace in good enough time. The tragedy is that the biggest casualties in all of this will be the consumers."

Quite an apocalyptic vision of the future. But sadly, he does have a point...

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Good to catch up with Evening Standard Court Reporter Paul Cheston.  Having got to know each other on various cases and stories over the years, one of  the things we enjoy doing from time to time is running media training together, focussed on ‘PR around cases’.  Rather than presenting to Kysen clients, this week Paul came in to coach the Kysen team.  Mayer Brown’s in-house PR Charlotte Ward joined us for the session, wanting to meet Paul in person as he’d quoted her partners in his coverage of the Star Wars case.

Always love Paul’s favourite example of a statement on the steps of court that won the war for the headlines, when the case itself was lost – Private Eye editor Ian Hislop after losing a defamation case to ripper wife Sonia Sutcliffe:

“If that’s justice, then I’m a banana”

The headlines ridiculed the decision to award Mrs Sutcliffe a then record-breaking £600,000 in damages to such an extent that she voluntarily offered to take only half.  The power of the press….

A more recent example of course was the Hackgate foam pie man this Summer on the steps of court after his conviction.  Even though he’d just been given a 6 week custodial sentence, his televised “I’d just like to say that this is the most humble day of my life”, beamed all over the world, managed to mock Rupert Murdoch all over again!

If you missed it, watch the video here

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News from the Edinburgh Festival which kicked off this week.  Oddest story so far is undoubtedly showbiz reports of John Malkovich no less, Oscar-winning actor of more than Than 70 years, personally handing out flyers on Edinburgh's Royal Mile for a show he's directing at the Festival: Julian Sands in a Celebration of Harold Pinter.

As Mr Malkovich is working so hard to promote the show, we thought we'd give him a hand.

You can buy your tickets here  

Heather Townsend

"So you're an international best-selling author!"

Lunch with Heather Townsend was a real privilege and I was honoured she could spare the time to see me now she is in such demand!  Heather's book, Business Networking, an FT Guide to using the power of online on offline networking for business success was only launched on 1 July, but already it has sold almost 2000 copies worldwide. 

Heather has an unusual skill-set.  With a background in engineering (including a degree from Oxford) and logistics, Heather is a master of process - and this is evident in the way she has structured her book: it is designed as an interesting read from cover to cover, but works equally well as a reference tool with a useful summary at the end of each chapter and a list of action points, (Heather is a strong believer in the practical application of new skills as soon as possible after the learning, to embed the new knowledge) as well as tips highlighted in box-outs throughout.  A highly recommended read. (You can order it from Amazon here.)

Heather worked for many years as an in-house training & development partner at BDO Stoy Hayward and today works equally comfortably with accounting and legal partnerships.  Her speciality is equipping professionals for partnership, latterly with a particular focus on how they can use social media to help, by building their networks.  Given her logistics background, she is particularly interested in prescribing systems for management and control of social media, also policies, in larger firms.

Follow Heather on twitter - you'll find her tweets useful.

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The week started sadly, with reports of Amy Winehouse's death last weekend.  Not surprising, some say, but deeply tragic none-the-less.  Of all the write-ups, I found the Economist's particularly touching, describing how she lived her life backwards: "Barely out of her teens ...she already had the knowing tone of a performer with a lifetime of heartbreak behind her. Then, in her 20s, she set about acquiring the tragic worldliness that the timbre of her voice conveyed."  Read the full Economist report here.







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Judgment Day on Wednesday made this an exceptionally busy and exciting week at Kysen.  The Supreme Court issued no less than five judgments,(clearing the decks before the Summer break do we think?), four of which we have been actively working on.  Phew! 

The Star Wars copyright case was particularly fun to work on: being such a massively loved global brand, the mention of Star Wars caught journalists' interest right away - and sent newspaper picture editors into a lather of excitement.  Subeditors also had a field day with the headlines, for example the Evening Standard's 'Empire Strikes Back in copyright War'.  The judgment brought a legal surprise as well, changing the law more dramatically than many expected and potentially opening the floodgates for foreign copyright litigation in the UK.


This is exactly what we come to work for! 

Martin Waller

"Which journalist would you most like  a one-to-one with?"

- a question put to me years ago by a legal journalist chum Dominic Egan who had just landed a plum job with The Daily Telegraph interviewing top business celebs.  He was having a ball deciding whom to interview each week and enjoying conversations with some of the business world's most fascinating individuals.  "Martin Waller" I answered without hesitation, Deputy City Editor of The Times and then its City Diarist.  Famous for his acerbic wit, his City Diary was the one column that would make me laugh out loud each morning during my daily read of the papers.  "Why don't you invite him out to lunch?" said Dominic.  And I did just that.

It turned out that Martin had a deep interest in the law and we worked on a number of stories together over the years.  I learned a lot about him in the process, particularly how is almost-obsessive attention to detail and insistence on getting every little fact right was what gave him the confidence and the freedom to express such damning opinions in his City Diary column!

So my highlight this week was catching up with Martin over lunch.  Since July last year he is editor of The Times' daily business analysis column Tempus, so we can all enjoy his sharp wit in this format now - he's certainly brought a lot of spark to the column since taking it over.

Interesting talking to Martin about the delicate balance Times journalists have to perfect in covering the biggest (at some points it looked like the only) story of the week: Hackgate.  Times journalists might be owned by News International but you'd never tell that from the independence of their reporting.  There's hope for old-fashioned journalist integrity yet....


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Not the News of the World

It makes such depressing reading,

I don't really want to add anything further,

other than to point to some of my

favourite satirical cartoons on the topic

Click here for more

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On a more positive note, we were excited to talk to clients this week about levels of new business wins coming through twitter. We've had similar experience ourselves. In particular, it has been interesting to note that a killer combination appears to be active networking on twitter, coupled with a strong pre-existing market reputation. We have heard a number of stories recently where professionals have, thanks to this social media platform, refreshed old clients or contacts they had lost contact with for years - going on to win new work as a direct result, as these people were reminded of how excellent their work had always been.

A message here for senior partners: don't think that twitter should be the preserve of the firm's associates - it's often the most experienced professionals who have the most to gain....

The Law Society

Interesting talking to The Law Society this week about how Legal Disciplinary Practices are changing the complexion of its membership and what this means for the member services they will need to think about offering in the future.   A legal marketeer client, recently made partner and consequently now a fully paid up Law Society member, pointed out to me the other day the inappropriateness in her eyes of The Law Society's current tag-line: 'supporting solicitors'.  As a new member, every time she receives a communication from her new membership organisation, she says this tagline shouts at her that she is still very much an outsider - despite being named on the official Law Society roll. 


This week I spoke to bods from The Law Society's training and publications teams.  Two years after the advent of LDPs the number of non-lawyer Society members is still relatively small, but of course this will only grow over time.  Moreover, there is now a new generation of legal marketeers starting their careers in the knowledge that 'partnership' is a possible career destination.  That just wasn't on the horizon in my days in-house.  I was curious to know how The Law Society is thinking about this challenge.  Do they see it as their role to develop a set of professional standards, structured career paths and training for non-law professionals in law firms?  Not just marketing and PR professionals of course, but professionals in the finance, IT, HR teams etc as well.  The answer is that it's part of an internal conversation at the moment, but of course it's very early days.  Interesting challenges ahead!


* * *

Jon Busby was charm personified when I met him for lunch this week.  After all his baiting and teasing on twitter, quite honestly I didn't know what to expect!  But his conversation was fascinating, he was charm itself, as I said, and he was very amusing to boot.  


As many of you will know from his very lively twitter feed and blog, Jon is in the business of persuading law firms to maximise the use of technology to re-think the delivery of professional services, perfecting that all-important separation between the commoditisible and the high-value-add.  He has some very interesting observations on how professional firms approach decisions on 'transformative business purchases'.  The partnership decision-making structure doesn't always lend itself particularly well to decisions that are tricky in any business context - about big financial and structural commitments to changing the entire way services are delivered.  But certainly enough people get what he is offering to keep this man very, very busy.


He says he learned early on in his life to keep his presentations short and impactful to avoid the 'glaze-over'.  See above illustration for example of alternative to powerpoint slide. He talked about 'the consensual nod' and the importance of avoiding it - a wonderful phrase he invented to describe how people will sometimes agree with you in a sales pitch just to hurry you to the end!  Love it!


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An amusing postscript 
to the super injunctions furore back in May is the release this week of statistics showing how Twitter's UK following jumped by a third that month, boosted in particular by women over 50 keen to follow the blanket coverage of celebrity shenanigans and their attempts to gag the press and cover their traces.  Great to know this demographic is now fully engaged with Twitter in one sense - but in other ways not really  sure whether this is something to celebrate, or be depressed about....

Other interesting Twitter news this week was the release of Twitter for Newsrooms Now the microblogging site has released an official guide showing reporters how to make the most of Twitter as they go about their daily work.  Nothing new for the initiated, but the mere fact Twitter has bothered to launch this guide shows yet again the impact of social media on the news.


We live in interesting times!