MEET THE BEYOND CENTRAL TEAM

The Group is headed by a formal corporate board led by Matt Fleetwood. The first two businesses that the group established straddle the commercial environment and the family and children law environment.

The Group board is accountable to the Group’s businesses and their teams. It isn’t encumbered with an archaic, overly-formal partnership structure in its decision making. It can make common-sense business decisions quickly, and leaves people to get on with what they are good at.

The board doesn’t comprise numerous partners but rather the heads of each business, together with the heads of the operational, finance, IT and marketing teams.

We wanted a structure that was inclusive, could support our teams and their management teams decisively, and avoided the business distraction of partner politics. It’s a modern approach which means better business, better culture, and better decision making.

We believe that identity, input, responsibility, accountability and an ability to be part of the ownership is important to our partners. It’s important to us too: it gives our clients and teams confidence, and enables our businesses to grow dynamically. It’s also sensible business.

We still have traditional partners’ meetings because it’s important to engage with all of our teams and make sure we are getting their input. Our partners from every business meet formally each quarter to discuss everything from strategy and marketing to business development and recruitment.

We have a great in-house IT team which is growing all the time as we develop better systems, better software and applications and training for the teams within our businesses.

Together with people and training, it is our biggest area of investment and every one of our people has the same hardware – whether senior or junior, support or DPU. It’s all designed to support fully remote, paperless working and automation. It’s why we were able to move every member of our team to a fully remote working environment within 10 hours of the UK’s Covid-19 lockdown.

We wanted to get rid of the disconnect between legal IT support, the way it is developed, and the needs of lawyers and clients. So we brought in ex-lawyers to the team to help develop out our systems.

We have a strong finance team headed by our Group finance director. We operate multiple businesses, and so we have a team which can operate sophisticated financial operations and the financial systems that support those operations, whether volume or more discrete.

The team has a very strong attitude towards reporting and financial management on individual matters, credit and cost control, and support our lawyers that work on the front line. It’s a better experience for clients and a supportive environment for our lawyers who benefit from consistent reporting and can be confident in the firm’s financial discipline and performance.

Marketing legal services has never been more sophisticated, and we have never worked in a more competitive environment.
We have a specialist in-house team which has developed a bespoke communications strategy covering advertising, events, website, pitching process, CRM programme,

PR and communications campaigns and digital strategies, aligning internal, external and stakeholder communications against our business priorities, all designed to support the development of our brand and unique Group culture.

Our external communications programmes don’t over-complicate and are delivered with human and business perspective front-of-mind. Our internal communications strategies are designed for both teams and individuals and support them with strategic marketing counsel to meet their individual business objectives balanced with the needs of the wider Group.