A grown-up approach

We speak to Glen Gilson – chairman and managing partner of Gilson Gray – about the firm’s UK-wide growth and how realism is at the heart of its work culture.

Gilson Gray has been one of the great success stories of Scottish law and, indeed, Scottish business over the last decade. Currently enjoying its 10^th anniversary, among its many notable achievements Gilson Gray, a full-service law firm with almost 500 staff UK wide, has become the market leader for residential conveyancing in Scotland and is a welcome example of a Scottish business bucking the Anglification trend with a number of expansions south of the border. 

But while Gilson Gray’s founder, chairman and managing partner Glen Gilson began his career in the very earth-bound environs of a leading Scottish law firm, his entrepreneurial ambitions were actually sparked closer to 30,000ft.

“I trained at Turcan Connell, which was an excellent private client specialist and the plan was always to go to the Bar,” Glen says. 

“I matriculated quite young at the Bar but, as I was working my notice period at Turcan Connell, my parents had a business that got into difficulty. I took over that business and built it out, did a turnaround, and sold it. That company was an airline – Air Charter Scotland – and it was quite a stressful situation that was crucial for the family’s financial future. We could have lost everything.”

Glen’s success in the high-profile world of aviation led to a number of enquiries from other businesses. First, he was approached by HBJ, now Addleshaw Goddard, to build the firm’s private client operation. Within the first year of operation, that became the largest part of HBJ’s business and Glen joined the board, working particularly on HBJ’s mergers and acquisitions activity. 

“I was 24 when I went in to do that, so my main exposure from an early age was senior professional services management, and that’s really been my specialism from day one, although I’m a lawyer by trade,” Glen says. 

“But I have to say that I didn’t really enjoy it. I found a lot of the conversations at management level to be restrictive and I found certain cultural issues to be personally problematic. The disconnect between people at the top and elsewhere in the lineage, and also the kind of risk orientation that is not unsurprisingly prevalent in law, I found to be quite prohibitive.

“I actually found HBJ to be hugely entrepreneurial in comparison to the sector as a whole and I learned a lot from Malcolm McPherson and Fraser Jackson in the 10 years I was there. The current Scottish managing partner Alan Shanks is an excellent individual. But it got to the stage where I realised this probably wasn’t for me.”

New opportunities

As Glen sought out a new course, he was approached with a number of opportunities, such as the offer of private equity to start a bank, and even the job of chief executive at a large retail bank. 

“I also began to receive a lot of approaches from within the legal sector, to the effect of saying: If you are thinking of a new course, why don’t you stay in the law and be a managing partner? However, a lot of the approaches that I received from law firms came with a list of things that I wasn’t allowed to do,” Glen says

“It did lead me to think, there’s an opportunity and an appetite, and there are people who feel that law can be conducted slightly differently. So I gathered together a really strong group of people – mixtures of ‘Magic Circle 'backgrounds, to smaller specialist firm backgrounds – and we launched Gilson Gray in 2014 as the largest example in the sector’s history.”

In the 10 years since, Gilson Gray’s rise has been nothing short of meteoric. As well as being the fastest-growing law firm in Scottish history, both in terms of turnover and profitability, Gilson Gray has established a tripartite footprint based around law, finance and property. The company’s investment management business is the largest of its type in Scotland, with around £1 billion currently under management. And on the property side, Gilson Gray is a market leader in some of its operating regions. 

“We have a cross-fertilisation model that is very strong because we have people coming in for one type of work, who are then able to be serviced multi-disciplinary across the group,” Glen says.

“And that’s been coupled with an appetite to be involved in areas that firms of our scale or full-service footing haven’t always had the expertise or wish to go into, such as the residential conveyancing market. We’ve always liked that market, although I would go so far as to say that it is the hardest space to work in in law. However, we strategically invested millions of pounds in that space, and have become the Scottish market leader as a result”

Heading south

Such success has led to some of Gilson Gray’s clients – institutional grade referrers such as large estate agencies and large mortgage brokerages – asking the firm if it would consider doing the same work in England. To that end, in 2022, Gilson Gray acquired Lincoln-based Home Property Lawyers. In addition they recently took over London-based PCM Solicitors, with a further likely expansion into middle England.

“We are taking advantage of an entry point to the English market that has allowed us the scale and the reputational traction to take over firms, and residential property is one of around twenty legal divisions in the Firm,” Glen says. 

“In the case of London, we are now in the process of installing further blue chip legal services to match the full corporate, commercial and private client offering across Scotland. We’re immediately bringing in litigation people and adding to the family law side, as well as corporate law, real estate, private client and employment law. Ultimately, we will end up with symmetrical service competencies across the UK. 

“We want to be in Newcastle and probably Manchester and Birmingham pretty soon. The growth of Gilson Gray has been contra-trend in terms of the Anglification. It’s been fast growth, while avoiding over exposure. And we’re hopeful that that journey will continue over the next few years.”

From growth to grown-up

So what has been the key to Gilson Gray’s growth? Undoubtedly, Glen’s personal experience and acumen are vital ingredients – as is the extensive knowledge of the property sector provided by managing director of property services, Matthew Gray. But perhaps even more fundamentally, Gilson Gray operates with a specific focus on generating a grown-up work culture with its staff, in spite of any prevailing social or financial pressures.

“Children from my generation were told work hard, play hard, stiff upper lip and all that. Now there is a much more complicated psychology that goes to encourage progressive career paths and teaching them how to deliver success. There’s a lot more to it than hard work,” Glen says.

“But fundamentally, attitude remains the core component. At Gilson Gray we’re not interested in identity politics; all we are interested in is your level of competence and your character. You’ll find that if you focus on those things – rather than quotas, rather than politics – if you are honest with people and you focus on the things that matter, you will find that you solicit a diverse range of really great people and they will want to stay in the business. Conversely, cultural assassins don't last long with us.” 

“If you are asking what the secret to our growth and success has been, it is not me or any single individual, it is the quality and ethics of our staff. They are amazing. It’s the attitude of our excellent partner base and the tireless effort of the wider management team. I have an exceptional business partner in Matthew Gray and I’m fortunate enough to be surrounded by people who get it.

“They know life is tough, that we have to do things we don’t like sometimes, and stuff will go wrong. Sometimes I can be a bit hard on them. Sometimes they can be a bit hard on me! Yet the intent and drive is always there to do the right thing together. To uncompromisingly drive success and progress. To treat each other well, to be accountable, and to sort it fast if we do drop a ball.”

Realism first

Of course, there is another vitally important element to retaining staff: renumeration. Here, again, Gilson Gray operates with an honesty and realism that is perhaps unique.

“We do not expect our junior fee earners to do 1680 hours a year – which is the standard now – because junior fee earners just can’t do that, they don’t have the expertise to do it. So we are not going to promise them the basic starting salaries that some of the larger regional players are offering these younger lawyers because we know that leads to performance management issues and to redundancies. That is all utterly predictable and why the sector repeats it’s mistakes, I do not know,” Glen says.

“Post credit crunch the same thing happened in the real estate market. People jump to match salary levels and they don’t take notice of normal patterns of behaviour, the learning trajectory of junior staff, and what clients are willing to pay. There will always be a price to pay at the end. That price is currently being paid, I feel, by junior members of staff, who are losing their jobs or who are being asked to do things that they can’t sensibly expect to do. 

“At Gilson Gray we have always communicated with staff about what our mutualised interest is. We say: ‘We think this is reasonable and we think this is safe. If you do this, you will get that.’ If you hit your target, you will be among the best rewarded in your market. We have got a lot of gritty adult people who like to be communicated with in that manner. I have huge respect for our people.

“The object of this business is not the absence of adversity, it is how we deal with that and opportunity together. That culture is why we have grown so much faster than anyone else. We are not a perfect business and we don’t pretend to be. Sometimes I think it is more like organised chaos: a mixture between a private equity company, a law firm and a nightclub. It's quick moving, energetic, noisy and imperfect. But, it’s working and has been consistently working over many years.”

Written by Matt Lamy, writer