Leaders in Law featuring Brian Noon

In-House Legal Solutions’ Brian Noon has been featured in the August 2024 issue of the Liverpool Law society’s Magazine monthly “Leaders in Law segment. Brian shared insight into being a leader in the law industry, the role as a director of a law firm, and the ins and outs of building a successful business.

Many thanks to the Liverpool Law society for featuring Brian and IHLS in this issue and continuing to encourage insightful and positive conversations in the Law industry, that are we strive to be a part of.

Read the full piece below:

Briefly describe your role as Managing Partner and the main duties of this position.

In-House Legal Solutions is managed and led by my wife Lauren and I, and so we have split certain responsibilities between us. On the business side I oversee finance, operations, marketing, and take the lead on strategy working closely with Lauren. As a senior in-house lawyer I am still heavily client facing and manage the relationships with many of our clients, and spend a large part of my time working with and mentoring our junior team. I also have the responsibility as the firms COLF and money laundering reporting officer. So a very mixed role which allows me to be involved in various different things which is what I enjoy.

What are the positive and negative aspects of the role?

By far and away the biggest positive of the role not only as director but also joint owner of the business is freedom – freedom to build a business in the way you want it to be shaped, and to take it in the directions that you think have the most promise of success. Deciding what success looks like is also a huge positive, as we don’t have other shareholders or investors to please, so the bottom line doesn’t always have to be the main thing that matters. Our ambition with the business was to build a legal services business in a unique model and run it in a different way, and to bring opportunities to aspiring lawyers that were otherwise hard to find. That has meant focusing a lot of resources – and our personal time – on training paralegals who have eventually become trainee solicitors and then qualified with us, which has been really rewarding and satisfying to see over the seven years since we were founded. We’ve also been able to spend time on CSR initiatives which has included talking about law in schools, holding open days for minorities, and our team has even won national awards for its work. So the freedom to decide in which direction we head, and how we decide to get there, is certainly the one thing I enjoy the most. On the downside – the lack of sleep! There is lots to do especially when the whole business is our own creation and inevitably our responsibility, which means everything matters to us. Learning to delegate – and building the best team around you that you can trust – can be challenging, but becomes easier over time. There is always a feeling of laying ground work for the future, from which you can build, but the idea of achieving a better balance between work and life can start to feel like a mirage in the desert. Still a work in progress.

What changes to the running of the firm have you implemented because of Covid?

We were luckily well placed to deal with Covid as we were a reasonably new business with all services in the cloud, and the team already worked from laptops. The main change was learning how to use Teams for the first time! Since then we have adopted hybrid working and relaxed our dress requirements with a dress for your day approach (albeit things move so quickly it can be hard to know what the next day will look like!).

As a result of Covid, what are your new agile working policies and why?

The main change was to allow hybrid working in a way that gave flexibility while still trying to preserve team togetherness, learning and communication. We achieve this by having two fixed anchor days where the team is all in together, which makes sure we can all be around each other and share each others’ company as a team which is personally important to us. Striking the balance between offering as much flexibility as possible but still providing an environment to learn, grow, and collaborate in the best way is one that has been discussed a lot over the last few years, and whilst the overall output of the business can be taken as being what really counts, we look at the piece more holistically.

 What do you see as your biggest challenges?

All businesses especially in the legal industry have the same challenges of recruitment, to constantly innovate and to manage work as cost effectively as possible. These are key challenges for us also, but more profound in our situation is the challenge of building a reputation in the market for providing a service which is unique but more importantly, of real benefit. The notion of providing the services of an in-house legal team for hire is not something that the majority of in-house teams would have come across, and whilst there are a variety of legal businesses offering temporary staffing, a business that offers a range of specifically dedicated in-house legal services – from on demand contract support, high volume processing, data Leaders in Law: Brian Noon Movers & Shakers Movers & Shakers www.liverpoollawsociety.org.uk 25 Leaders in Law protection to legal team optimisation – to in-house legal teams is totally new and refreshing. The challenge we have therefore with a set budget is to find innovative ways to communicate that effectively and widely to the market.

What aspects of the firm are you most proud of?

I am most proud of how we have been able to build a respected legal services business from the ground up, through using our own contacts and innovative ideas, with no outside investment. We literally pitched to our first clients from our kitchen table with just two laptops, mobile phones and a website, and were able to convince very large investment funds and pension schemes to put their trust in us. The fact that we are a small business in comparison to many firms but have large clients in the financial services sector, PLCs, and clients with operations based all over the world is real testament to the work that our dedicated team carries out day to day. We service our clients’ needs not only in Europe but in the US, and Asia Pacific, and so being able to build the systems and processes and brand to enable us to do that is an achievement our whole team is proud of.

What are your immediate short-term goals?

In the short term we are focused on building a strong management and operations team which will give us the platform to allow rapid growth in the next three years. A business like ours needs to constantly reinvent how it does things as it grows, steps into new markets and areas, and takes on more staff, and without a strong function operations and admin side to the business the team cannot reach its full potential. Investments also in AI where we have partnered with one of the largest providers of legal AI solutions and in our own IT tools which we build ourselves in house including our client portal are key to increasing productivity and improving the client experience. Finally, growth in our client base is always a key short term goal and we hope to continue and potentially accelerate our year on year growth that we have experienced so far.

Where do you see the firm ten years from now?

It depends which crystal ball I have in front of me at the time! Our mission is to provide the most trusted, reliable, value for money in-house legal solutions in the UK and beyond, and I hope that in ten years we have grown to be a respected provider of in-house legal solutions and potentially the leader in our field, and have grown our presence internationally. I would also like to see us continue to develop and nurture aspiring legal talent and offer careers in in-house law but via our outsourced model, which can provide the support, training and opportunities that in-house roles can lack.

What legacy, as Director and Co-Founder, would you like to leave the firm?

It seems strange to think of ever leaving the business, however there will come a point when Lauren and I either step back or step away to perhaps focus on other things. I hope at that point that Lauren and I leave a legacy of what hard work, bravery, determination and above all the desire to – as far as possible – do the right thing by our people and our clients, can achieve.

Link to read the full August issue: LLS August 2024 

Link to most recent issue:Liverpool Law Magazine | Liverpool Law Society