The Chambers transformation

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Audio Transcript

Tim Smallbone

Hello and welcome to Inflexion Point, the podcast that explores those crucial moments in a company's journey that changed the trajectory of success. Through conversations with business founders and entrepreneurs, we'll explore what those moments look like, how to recognise them and harness them. And in this episode, we'll consider the legal directory that sat on almost every lawyer's desk for 30 years, and how it was transformed into a digital-only powerhouse.

Tim Noble

That oh my God moment was, wow, we've got this incredible brand, we've got this incredible platform, which is all based upon the underlying quality of our research. We can really make this grow.
Jonathan Battye
It really is about having a brilliant piece of IP, helping shift that product from a manual process into a digital world.

Tim Smallbone

I'm Tim Smallbone, and in my 20 years as a partner at Inflexion, I've been lucky enough to witness a huge number of these moments as they happen, all of them critical to every success story. And the Chambers and Partners tale is a classic example of its type, so I'm delighted to welcome Chief Executive Tim Noble and Jonathan Battye from Inflexion's Commercial team. Welcome to you both, and thank you for joining us.

Tim Noble

Thank you, Tim.

Tim Smallbone

Tim, you're not a lifer at Chambers. Tell us a little bit about yourself. We'll get to the Inflexion point in a moment, but let's do a little bit of framing first of all. Tell me a bit about yourself and what you were doing before you came to Chambers.

Tim Noble

So I had the pleasure of joining Chambers in 2019. Previous to that, I'd just been part of a private equity exit to a company called Intercontinental Exchange, so one of the larger US public companies. And they bought a company called Interactive Data, which also happens to be in the data analysis space in the financial sector. So yes, so I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to, at the beginning of the journey with Inflexion, to join Chambers.

Tim Smallbone

And Jonathan, you came along during the course of Chambers' investment.

Jonathan Battye

Yes, that's right. So I've been involved, I guess, a bit more recently with the Chambers team, certainly as they sort of think about their pricing, packaging, propositional development work.

Tim Smallbone

And just for our audience, just tell us a little bit about your background. You used to advise the Prime Minister.

Jonathan Battye

Once upon a time, correct. So I sit in our Value Acceleration team with Inflexion, looking after kind of commercial strategy and effectiveness topics. So everything from pricing to product to sales force effectiveness. But actually, as you said correctly, Tim, I started my career in the civil service in a grandly titled Prime Minister's Delivery Unit.

Tim Smallbone

So you can compare and contrast advising Tim to advising the Prime Minister. We'll get back to that.

Jonathan Battye

Absolutely.

Tim Smallbone

So Tim, just tell us a little bit about what Chambers does, first of all, what it did, if you like, before the transformation moment came.

Tim Noble

So Chambers is a legal directory. If you were a corporate sort of in-house counsel, and you were looking for legal representation in some form or matter or another, then clearly you might compare different law firms, different departments, different lawyers, and outside of talking to the lawyers, you would also go to Chambers to see which were the best-ranked lawyers. So we really just differentiate legal talent. But more and more now we start collecting data, and we start analysing that data, and then with that data, we actually provide that back to law firms so that they can help differentiate themselves and also increase their performance.

Tim Smallbone

And the core of the inflexion point was how we handle the data, how we present it.

Tim Noble

When we talk about how we present the data, then you can imagine, in fact, it was a bit of a joke, which is that Chambers produced directories, which were just large books.

Tim Smallbone

Literally books.

Tim Noble

Yeah, and we had different guides for different geographies. So there was a UK guide, a US guide. Whenever there was a new guide launch, then all these lawyers would sort of attend the launch. And then the first thing they would do after we'd made a few introductory comments is they would run to the corner, grab one of these books and see whether or not they were ranked and what band they were ranked. And then they would leave with sort of clutching this massive book. But one of the inflexion points is actually when we removed all those books and now through Chambers.com, all of our rankings, all of our background, everything is now delivered digitally.

Tim Smallbone

Jonathan, what were your first impressions when you first went out and met the team at Chambers?

Jonathan Battye

My first impressions were one of a really well-functioning team. It's really clear that everyone is clear on the role they're playing in Tim's leadership team. And then it is that collective debating, aligning on a decision that I think really comes through in the way that the team operates.

Tim Smallbone

What did you think when you first came in? Was there a sort of oh my God moment when you realised how the business was actually working?

Tim Noble

That oh my God moment a little bit was the opportunity that there was at Chambers. I mean, what it had never really considered was invest in sales, new commercial propositions, new tech. And I think the real, therefore moment was, wow, we've got this incredible brand, we've got this incredible platform, which is all based upon the underlying quality of our research, which again, we can talk about. And then within investment in tech, investment in pricing, investment in product, investment in sales, you know, we can really make this grow.

Tim Smallbone

So what did you start with? What was like the kick-off moment? Did you focus on learning what the customers were saying, or talking to the employees? How did you sort of start to work out how you were going to do it?

Tim Noble

Right back at the very beginning, there were two areas that we focused on. One was the tech. Our whole tech transformation has been broadly in three parts. One was the enterprise bit, so literally giving people laptops, the ability to just do things in a modern way. The next was enabling people, as an example, putting Salesforce in. So salespeople had something, some CRM system they could use. Then the third part was the digital transformation. So the first thing we did was tech. The second thing we did was just start to increase the number of salespeople. We had 200 researchers and we had five salespeople. And even then I can smile as to whether or not they were really core salespeople or whether or not they were just effectively renewing. And so that, again, that was a bit of a sort of a no-brainer. We've become more sophisticated now, but five years ago, all we really needed to do was just grow the team — if we had 10 salespeople, we were likely to sell twice as much as if we had five salespeople. Then we sat down and did a very fact-based strategy which Jonathan and the team really helped us with, as to what would be the next phase of growth after the really obvious.

Jonathan Battye

This is a common theme we see where it really is about having a brilliant piece of IP, the research team in this example, helping shift that product from a manual process into a digital world, to then think about how we package it up and the proposition we take to our customers and then put the beans behind it with the sales team. This is a kind of well-trodden path, and actually I think Chambers is just a fantastic example of how it all comes together to then create fantastic results.

Tim Smallbone

Wasn't there a moment where you sort of switched the books off? Can you just tell me about that key moment when there was a fundamental business change in the middle of this story.

Tim Noble

So Chambers.com existed long before we all joined Chambers. But as we started to put the directories onto Chambers.com, effectively all we were doing was putting a PDF version of the directory onto Chambers.com so you could access it that way. So we sort of did it in parallel. One is we redefined Chambers.com. We were able then to fully migrate all of our directories effectively to being electronic delivery only. And I think that the final moment came was, and actually this was probably helped somewhat by the pandemic because we soon realised that sending directories to people's offices probably wasn't working — they were probably never going to receive them and they weren't going to use them. Not only does it cost us a lot in print and distribution, but also it's not very sustainable. And I can't remember the exact date, but there was a time, sort of the middle of 2020, that we just took the decision, right, we were now going to turn off all physical production and all physical distribution of our directories. And there was a little bit of concern, even within Chambers, that actually, would people come to the website? Would they look at it? If they don't get a book, how will they be reminded to go and look at Chambers? But of course, exactly the opposite happened. So we stopped the print, we stopped the distribution, and we now measure the amount of traffic that we have on chambers.com.

Tim Smallbone

It's interesting you referenced COVID and lockdown as a stimulus for change and it made it slightly easier to make that change.

Tim Noble

It did. And actually there was another change that it stimulated too, which is now we work in a hybrid working environment. So those 200 researchers that I'm talking about when we acquired Chambers were all based in sort of central London. There was always a view as to what would be best practice and is it best practice to have 200 researchers with a desk in the middle of, you know, West London or would there be a different or a more efficient or more effective way of doing it? Those researchers now come into the office one or two days a week, but otherwise they work fully remotely. And we do just as many interviews, we review just as many surveys as we ever did.

Tim Smallbone

You've changed the way you organise the business, you changed the technology of the business, you changed the pricing. How did it then develop from there?

Tim Noble

So, as I said, once we'd done the obvious, as it were, we had to develop the ongoing long-term strategy. Because part of the opportunity that we have at Chambers, but also part of what was daunting about it, is there are so many different ways that we could have chosen to grow. We decided what our growth strategy was going to be. And actually, I remember Tim presenting it to you. And we were very clear that we were going to grow by expanding our core. We were going to increase our focus on data and analytics, and there was going to be a geographic expansion. And we set up a transformation programme. We had a very sort of detailed work plan, and we're focused on delivering that for now the last two years.

Jonathan Battye

Within our propositional work, we talk a lot about good, better, best approaches to how we package out the products. I think there's some really nice work we've done with the Chambers team to really sort of bring that to life, so that, you know, actually it really fuses in with the data side, where we know we really started this conversation about how you think about a package that's available for sale to the customer, starting from the core product and building into some of those insights.

Tim Smallbone

And in the middle of this, our US expansion was completely fundamental to what we achieved.

Tim Noble

Some terrifying number, something like 70% of the legal spend is in the US. So again, as a part of the strategy work, it became very clear that the three geographic regions to focus on were the US, Brazil and China. Rather bad timing; we opened up our office right in the middle of the pandemic. However, we now have 12 people based in the US, and it's a mixture of research and commercial, so that'd be sales and customer success. And the growth in the US has been just phenomenal. We also tried a new experiment about six months ago, which was that normally we rank what I would call the largest, most prestigious law firms.

However, as you can imagine, in the US, there are thousands of what I would call mid-sized law firms. These aren't the small kind of ones above a shop, but these are actually sort of mid-sized law firms. And again, through our research, we now have a whole new ranking, which we call Spotlight, which has just increased the size of the market in the US.

Tim Smallbone

Jonathan, from your perspective, how does this experience compare with the other Inflexion stories you've been involved with?

Jonathan Battye

I mean, I think there's a lot to love about the Chambers story. You know, I think we've heard lots about it through the whole discussion we've had so far. But I think in almost all cases we see, there's inevitably some kind of no regrets, quick wins. And so getting those going early makes complete sense and there's sort of learnings for everybody there and just getting the things that are self-evidently right moving quickly. But then I think really taking the time to think through where the business is today, what it does really well, and making sure you don't lose sight of that, but also then thinking about the areas that need more time, effort, energy to improve, to sort of unlock that next phase of growth.

Tim Smallbone

I mean, in terms of the customer approach, you have brand here, which we don't always have.

Jonathan Battye

Yeah, correct. I mean, you know, really a fantastic brand and a fantastic underlying product, at the heart, I think, for me, of the Chambers example. You know, we do see both of those in a number of our businesses, but then how you fuse together digital, data, and commercial, I think, can create something really, really special, which I think is what we now see in Chambers.

Tim Smallbone

Yeah. Tim, it's an extraordinary story. Knowing what you know now, as you reflect back on it, are there some things you do differently? Were there some moments that were particularly traumatic along the way?

Tim Noble

Time goes by very quickly; pulling the strategy together and starting to execute on the strategy, I would do it sooner. So there's a balance between doing what's the really obvious and then at the same time, thinking about, right, how are we going to grow this once we've done the obvious? I think have there been some, you know, traumatic moments? I mean, I think it was quite a brave decision when we decided just to stop distributing and producing books, but just to go kind of entirely online, you know, the belief was, would anybody look? And, you know, as we talked about a moment ago, I think actually the idea of opening up the first office outside of London, so one in New York, and therefore investing in everything that comes with that, was also brave — but the trauma probably was that I didn't manage to get to meet the team for about 18 months for all the obvious reasons once we decided to set up the office.

Tim Smallbone

Was there a moment where you thought, I'm really on to something here?

Tim Noble

Yes, there have been moments. Well, firstly, if you just look at the results, right? So our growth rate over the last sort of five years has been 20% plus in bookings and actually is accelerating and our EBITDA growth rate too is sort of 30% plus over the last five years. And so again, you can see that once you get the momentum, then yeah, you realise that you're really on to something here.

Tim Smallbone

Taking a pause, Jonathan, to look at where we are right now, what's next for the business from an Inflexion commercial point of view?

Jonathan Battye

From my perspective, what we're really trying to do here is unleash the power of the Chambers brand and the power of the underlying product, to be able to package it up in the most effective way we can for the lawyers, for Chambers' customers, and then ensure we're able to monetise that and achieve the best possible value, which will then manifest itself in continued, you know, revenue growth of 20 plus percent, as Tim's spoken about.

Tim Smallbone

And Tim, where does the business go from here? It's an extraordinary transformation story.

Tim Noble

Well, the beauty of it is, there are so many places that we could continue to transform the business. But I continue to say, I think there are three areas. One is that we will continue to develop the core of Chambers, which is what Jonathan's been talking about. The second is increasing the whole area of data and analytics. And the third is the geographic expansion. As I talked about, we're growing in the US, but actually there are so many other geographies that we could grow.

Tim Smallbone

That's it for this episode. My thanks to Tim and to Jonathan for joining me. Remember to subscribe to Inflexion Point wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss an episode. And check out the Inflexion website if you would like to learn more about how we back ambitious business owners and help them to accelerate sustainable growth. Thanks for listening.

The Chambers transformation

In this episode, Inflexion Point tells the story of Chambers and Partners, the legal directory that sat on almost every lawyer's desk for three decades, and how it became a digital-only powerhouse. Host Tim Smallbone is joined by Chambers Chief Executive Tim Noble and Jonathan Battye from Inflexion's Value Acceleration team to trace the shift from printed guides to Chambers.com. They reflect on the moments that shaped it: the brave decision to switch off physical books entirely in 2020, the early investment in technology and CRM, the move from five salespeople to a proper commercial engine, and the fact-based strategy built around expanding the core, deepening data and analytics, and growing overseas. Along the way, they talk US expansion, the Spotlight ranking that opened up the mid market, hybrid research teams, and why a world-class brand and the research beneath it became the platform for everything that followed.