Profile / A law unto himself: Alan Morris

He heads a top City law firm ... and he's an accountant. Catrin Griffiths meets the outsider who overcame the profession's insularity

IT IS virtually unheard of for an accountant to be elected head of a top City law firm. In the still rather stuffy legal profession, mere bean counters come way down the pecking order - fine to beaver away in the accounts department, but hardly suitable to run the whole show.

So Simmons & Simmons, which employs 569 lawyers, made a little bit of history in February. In a contested election, its partners voted in its finance director Alan Morris, a non-lawyer, as the next managing director.

The implications of the Simmons & Simmons vote are huge. Many managing partners of other City law firms are not primarily managers, but fee- earners. Morris's elevation is confirmation of the transformation of law firms into businesses. It is the most compelling example yet that the notorious clannishness of the legal profession is on the wane. Morris, 39, had been finance director for three years before he conceived the idea last autumn of standing for election. He was well known at the firm: an ambitious man exuding energy, tempered with a slightly laconic edge, he helped to run the firm's cricket team ("we're playing the MCC this summer," he notes proudly) and organising plays and revues. But the changes he had put in place as finance director - instituting more effective management accounting systems - made him hungry for more. "At that point I'd wrung all the juice out of the challenge of the finance director's job," he admits.

Morris canvassed several partners before making it known that he was interested in leading the firm. These quiet soundings were vital in his campaign for election, since there was a hugebarrier in his way. This was the constitution of the firm, which provided for a managing partner, not a managing director. As a non-partner, Morris was therefore excluded. "I had to ask for the constitution to be changed," he recalls blithely. He got his way. For the next two months Morris and his three rivals - who are understood to include banking partner David Dickinson and property partner Charles Pollock - gave presentations to groups of partners throughout the firm. His experience back home in Dorking, in the award-winning drama group the Heath Players, came in useful. His voice is resonant, his speech fluid. "Acting gives you confidence about standing up and talking to people, helping you gauge an audience," he notes. His favourite stage role is Mercutio in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. "You get the sex and the violence," he jokes.

But any actor raffishness was dampened by Morris's desire not to be portrayed as the accountant outsider. More than once, he casually mentions his time at Cambridge, where he started off reading history before opting for law. "When I was invited to talk to groups of partners, obviously I emphasised my financial strength," he says. "But I know how to talk to people in their own language."

The election was a tense affair, and drawn out over two months. Because none of the four candidates had won the requisite 51 per cent on the first vote, the ballot went to two rounds. Morris finally emerged the outright victor in February. Perhaps mindful of partnership policies, Morris downplays his victory. "As finance director I was an awful lot easier to replace than some of the partners who were standing - so there was a strong negative factor in this," he argues. Morris's line in the hustings process was clear. He argued that Simmons & Simmons needed someone with formal management training and experience - still a novelty in an industry where the idea of the gifted management amateur still holds sway. "Management isn't something you do in your spare time. People are recognising that it is a skill that is necessary."

Indeed, Morris seems extraordinarily well-versed in management theory. Prone to drawing diagrams to emphasise a point, he is fond of making elaborate analogies; one, which draws a parallel between managing a partnership and leading a convoy of boats across the Atlantic, lasts for a full five minutes.

Morris's career has already taken a few turns. He went up to Cambridge Universityin 1975 to read history, but it wasn't long before he decided he wanted a business career.

"Maths was never my strong point, so choosing a career as an accountant was quite a risk-loaded thing," he confesses.

After graduating, Morris spent three years at Tate & Lyle, where he learnt his negotiating skills at the sugar shed in Liverpool, dealing with union officials, and then joined Esso as a management accountant in the marketing department. The efficiency which Esso brought to running its business would be influential in Morris's later role at Simmons & Simmons. "You could walk into any Esso place around the world and the standards would always be super. On top of that, it was very focused on how to take care of customers," he says. Within a year, Morris was running the financial accounting systems in his department, but ambition propelled him onwards. Esso left its mark, however: his wife Barbara, by whom he has two daughters, aged 10 and eight, used to be his boss there.

At 28 he became controller of a computer subsidiary of the Royal Bank of Canada - where he was sitting on the board with people 20 years his senior - and put in a completely new accounting system. He joined Simmons & Simmons in 1988 as deputy head of finance, before becoming finance director.

Yet Morris's rise is part of a wider change within the commercial end of the legal profession. It is only over the past few years that law firms have come to recognise that they are businesses, with profits to maintain, clients to keep happy, and employees to manage.

Law firm financial directors - many of whom have never opened a legal textbook in their lives - hold increasing power. At a growing number of City firms, financial information is no longer taboo. At Simmons & Simmons every fee-earner now has a copy of the firm's business plan.

Simmons & Simmons, in common with most City firms, had a rough time of it in the early Nineties. High-margin corporate work had fallen off, and while the firm had had the foresight to invest in international offices in Hong Kong, Abu Dhabi, Lisbon and Milan, its management was unpopular with some younger lawyers.

Because of a Byzantine profit-sharing structure, some junior partners declined equity partnership unless the whole thing was rejigged into a more conventional structure. Worse, the firm laboured under a staid, even stuffy reputation. It grabbed a healthier profile when advising the government of Abu Dhabi on the fall-out from the collapse of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, but was later ignominiously booted out in early 1995 in favour of Macfarlanes. "That was a slightly sour taste in what was an incredibly successful job for us," says Morris.

But with the impending privatisation of the railways - Simmons & Simmons acts for Railtrack in a job worth millions - tails at the firm are up. In 1994-95, the firm came eighth in the Legal Business 100 report into law firm finances, with pounds 74m in turnover. Average profits per partner were a healthy pounds 226,000, putting the firm 14th in the City. This year promises to be rather better. Rail privatisation has brought it some much-needed profile in the market, and looks set to be the springboard for a marketing drive. "If you can privatise the railways you can do anything," proclaims Morris.

It is too early to tell whether Morris is simply the first of a whole raft of finance directors taking over law firms, although his election has City lawyers speculating. Morris himself is characteristically guarded: "There's nothing that I can bring to the party that any lawyer can't bring, but I happen to have had experience." Yet the precedent set by Simmons & Simmons will be looked at carefully by other law firms - and by accountants.