Page 5 - Yearbook 2019

GEOFFREY LANDER
Non-Executive Chairman
Greetings once again and thank you to our loyal clients. In 2019 I completed my fth year as DJB’s rst Non- Executive Director and I am now DJB’s rst Chairman. It was a role I was offered ve years ago but rather like nding a home in a strange city (when it is advisable to rent rather than buy until one is comfortable that the right area has been chosen) I wanted time to settle in. I had absolutely no concern about the people I would be working with (and that remains the same) but I was convinced that a business model as clever as that of DJB
would soon be copied by others. Thankfully, it has not.
We have two clients both of whom are important in the same way as a hamburger requires both the lling and the bun to make it work: our clients and our lawyers. Without clients we would have no work for our lawyers, yet without our quality lawyers you wouldn’t remain clients. As you know, we only recruit experienced property solicitors with on average 23 years PQE mainly from other City rms. These are lawyers who have “been there and done it”. You will never be passed down to a junior since we don’t have any.
Most professional rms fall into the same trap of promoting their stronger professionals into management, a role they have rarely been trained for and rarely enjoy. If you ask any solicitor what the favourite part of their role is, the answer will nearly always be “lawyering”. If you ask those same solicitors the parts they least like, it is client management and supervising a team. Our lawyers do neither: we have experienced account managers to take care of you, the client. They are not engaged in deal-making so are always available to you and we only charge for lawyer time and not account management; two reasons why you remain so loyal.
The quality of this model is exempli ed by the fact that we have just celebrated our twentieth anniversary without ever having had a formal negligence claim.
So we have happy clients and happy lawyers. Not quite as appetising as a hamburger but close to it.
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