Acquisition experience by Joanna Kingston-Davies, The Jackson Canter Group
This article was also featured as a column in the June 2016 issue of LPM. To read the issue in full, download LPM.
The other month, I became group chief operating officer of the Jackson Canter Group following its acquisition of Lees Solicitors – the business where I’ve spent the last 10 years of my career, latterly as CEO. The last few weeks have been an exciting whirlwind of activity dealing with a multiplicity of necessary tasks arising from the takeover – from the late nights in the run up to completion to informing our people and engaging them in the new group. Not to mention dealing with the immediate priorities following completion and ensuring that our staff, customers and network are happy.
We’ve been massively buoyed by the positive reaction of our people across the group. The communication plans put in place in advance of completion, and the engagement with our people that took place immediately to ensure a reassured and happy workforce, have been fundamental in engendering this response.
This deal marked the end of months of negotiations and discussions. I have known my new colleagues for years, initially as peers in the sector, with whom it was really helpful to share ideas occasionally. Over that time we increasingly recognised our alignment of thinking about the way forward within the legal services sector, and last year a chance meeting at a conference with the now group executive chairman and group CEO really kick-started more concrete discussions. The more we talked, the more we became convinced that the two pieces of the multi-dimensional jigsaw our respective firms represented seemed to fit together incredibly well on many levels.
Looking back at the last year, I realise what a learning curve it’s been. While I’ve previously been heavily involved in post-merger integration at Lovells in Paris, being at the coalface of the M&A legal journey was new to me. The process can be exhausting, both physically and emotionally. Keeping sight of why we were doing it has been crucial to avoid the perils of deal fatigue and to maintain the momentum required to get the deal over the line. On the one hand, we would all engage enthusiastically about integration and our shared vision for the future. And yet on the other, we would need to sit on the opposite side of the table in tough negotiations on the minutiae of the legals, which – from the second the documents had been cleared off the table at the completion meeting and the bubbly cracked open – we hoped would never need to be considered again. One might think that working in the legal sector would set realistic expectations on this front. Not so, or certainly not in my case nor probably for anyone who isn’t a corporate lawyer. Our experience has been a classic example of walking in the client’s shoes to understand what they go through. This wisdom will undoubtedly now help us to continue to improve the service we provide to our own customers.
Advance knowledge of the structure of the process is crucial. The due diligence process can be extensive, and the legals complex and time-consuming. Trying to run a steady ship while dealing with the sale of a business discreetly is challenging, and I have never been so grateful to have such an amazing team around me who held the fort wonderfully while I was otherwise occupied.
The support of a strong legal and corporate finance team is also vital. We probably spent more time with them over the past six months than we did with our own families, so if you’re looking to go through the same journey, involving your advisers early on and choosing them wisely is highly recommended.
It was so important to us to keep coming back to why we were doing this in the first place – reminding ourselves of the culture fit, the shared vision of what we could achieve together and the belief that we would be stronger combined than apart. This is what got us all through, and now it’s over the line and we are one group, the focus is very firmly on making our own history together, doing what we do best – making a difference to the lives of our clients and people.
