If your clients are SMEs and they don't need a huge team to service them, keystone is ace. But as soon as you get into the clients who care more about getting the job done well than getting it done cheaply, keystone fails.
I also had a pal who used a guy at keystone. It went brilliantly, until he has a deal that needed about 5 lawyers on it. Keystone failed to resource it with a team who weren't z-grade so he dumped them midway through.
How is it that despite all the frothing every single time lax actually looks into anything past the end of his nose it’s revealed he has absolutely no idea how the world works at all? If you want to know how Keystone works fat lad why don’t you just ask them? Conversely if, as you assert, you are so pre eminent in your field with such a detailed knowledge of where your specialist offering fits in why do you even need to ask in the first place?
Heh! Cookie rolls out the old “i am old bearded guy who knows fook all, so I am going to sneer at others for asking questions” guff. Pull the other one m88 it auto-reports you to the SRA for indolence
You can have juniors laz- however you need to support them from the outset. Which is difficult unless you have guaranteed x amount from clients. Imagine even in that case may need to take out a loan?
He’s right to recognise my pre-eminence in my own tiny niche, however. At a technical level, probably the city’s leading practitioner. In billing terms it’s probably someone at some mental american shop, but we all know those guys are content-free shouters and shutters. I get things right.
TBH, every time I look at Keystone, I think it looks like more of an arse ache than starting one’s own small firm. They seem to offer little in exchange for the amount they skim off your fees.
The boundary to starting your own firm is insurance. You need it to start. Most insurers are not interested. The premiums and other compliance requirements will mean your admin is insane.
keystone and the like give you the platform - but it’s more of an advisory play than transactional imho. I have two friends who’ve been there for years and like it.
Laz - have your explore in house? You could boss being a GC
Isn’t the reality that your sense of entitlement convinces you that you should be making wads of cash for doing nothing as well as roffing all day about it?
They take the overheads out of your fee income. I don't actually know what happens of you uave no billings tbh.
The guys I know there started a while back with about 500k of regular repeat work so were billing from day one. For that you got paid 300k p/a and one of them was able to get the hours down working 6am to 10am and 4pm to 6pm.
He got to do a lot of school pick ups, Bath times and golfing.
I think keystone prob works fine tbh if you fib about your book, don’t mind paying your way for a while, are happy not to have any juniors and do everything yourself, etc. It probably does work better for advisory lawyers.
I am not really attracted to these models (Axiom as well) that cream off your earnings in exchange for not much. If I went solo it would be a proper law firm, SRA regulated yes, insured yes, with plush offices yes yes
Being a sole practitioner is a right balls ache. The admin these days is huge and PI costs are massive. If you need a PC but otherwise can basically run your own show then I suspect Keystone works fine. For sure a lot of people (including some of this parish) have used it pretty successfully to bridge the move to running their own firm. It let's you build a proper reputation/book with less risk and more ability to just jump back into a proper firm if it doesn't work out for you (without the headache of winding up a firm with run off PI to cover etc).
I know a few people who were chucked out of my firm in failing practice areas and ended up at similar places. As far as I'm aware they didn't take a single client
But they are all still in place and seemingly doing ok
It used to be the case that to be a partner anywhere you had to grasp how the business was run but with the odd exception above that appears now to be long gone.
laz - with the types of deals you do, and the risk of not getting paid (when the banks decide that they wont insist that their client pays your fees when a deal craters), its a big ask to be funding operating costs and salary costs. Banking teams run with crazy lock up in most firms. Even someone with their eye on the ball when it comes to admin and costs woudl struggle to keep a banking team's lock up sensible in a big firm.
You are best off finding a firm that has just lost some partners - and offer to go in as a partner but with a rem discussion at the end of the year based on performance.
A lot of the costs in running a business like Keystone and its competitors are fairly fixed and above a minimum size the marginal cost of adding another lawyer is a sum not entirely unadjacent to fook all. You're not provided with a fixed seat in an office and you're not paying 1/4 of the cost of a PA either. There's not much incentive to get rid of you if you bill low providing you are a net contributor after your marginal cost, especially when they are still looking to add numbers. You don't get paid until the client pays the bill, that's the whole point.
I spoke with them a few years ago. It was all very hard sell. Their paradigm was some ex MC big swinging d...
...inosaur who had taken away some big ticket thibg and had a sweatshop big team of parablozzas dedicated juniors churning away in a grotty rat filled rent an office suite of bespoke private rooms
It's great for stuff like conveyancing where you've got a constant churn and bills coming through every month and most of the time are just working on your own. Definitely on my radar as a step towards retirement where I could keep working for certain favoured clients and earn nearly as much as I do now for half the work. If I could guarantee my current level of work on moving I'd almost double my take home pay.
If your clients are SMEs and they don't need a huge team to service them, keystone is ace. But as soon as you get into the clients who care more about getting the job done well than getting it done cheaply, keystone fails.
From a client perspective they're not actually particularly cheap and capacity/availability is very patchy. Short of having a mate there, I can't think of any reason to use them over a local firm. Maybe they do well selling into SMEs with no legal functions? (It's how they got on our books before I joined).
Sorry meant to say as a conveyancing sole practitioner you can't get access to mortgage lender panels which rather restricts the work you can do especially dealing with the sort of clients who get a mortgage because they can afford to pay cash but can get a better return by putting their cash into their own investment fund.
I suspect it works well, where a pice of work only requires the input of 1 or 2 people. So real estate, litigation of most kinds, some ECM work, tax stuff, employment, seems ideal.
We as a firm ditched working for one lender as the fees their borrowers were willing to pay meant we only recovered about 30% of our time on most of their transactions.
Can't help thinking that the marketing team was asleep when someone came up with the name 'Keystone' in relation to a law firm. Too close to 'Keystone Kops' for my liking.
I know someone that does v well out of these types of arrangement, typically advising management on exits. You can get juniors and trainees/paralegals.
Ultimately US jokers operate on almost this model, as they have one massively overworked associate and some clueless gimp with stellar academics but zero practical training copying and pasting deal docs and firing out outdated precedents from their old firms.
TBH you should be able to automate about 75% of an average M&A/Finance deal, but nobody can face paying the upfront cost, likely £2-5m, and telling the client to do things in a way that enables this in exchange for 60% of the usual legal fees and 100% of the sleep deprived basic fook up removed.
I know quite a few people who have gone there over the years. Most of them had fading practices.
Some don't stay that long because it's hard to get new referrals. You really need to consistently work your existing book of business (their lawyers are allowed to have consultancy roles at other firms on the side though).
Say you're a partner or legal director with a modest £230k book of business. Unless you take a partner role where your new firm can otherwise keep you busy, in London if you want to move as a partner, you may be looking at an income of circa £100-120k at a lower mid-tier firm, not much more than a senior associate at such firm. At Keystone, you'd get about £160k.
I mention £230k as this seems quite close to their actual numbers. Keystone Law's latest accounts report average revenue per "Principal" (partners and similar) as £190k. That's comfortably lower than revenue per partner stats at every other Top 200 UK law firm. But then they don't have to use any of that revenue to pay associates, trainees, paralegals, BD staff, rent, etc. It mostly goes in your pocket. You do have to do the work yourself, however, which is a limiting factor, depending on how hard you want to work.
(I know they tell prospective joiners that they can pay colleagues to help them but I doubt this goes much beyond very junior colleagues. When all you have is your book of business you likely wish to protect it zealously.)
Keystone also makes sense for partners whose expertise and client base has become so niche that they've reached a career dead end and can't meaningfully increase revenue year on year.
And then there are those who like the independence, ability to choose their hours and not having to deal with partner politics and partnership admin.
I do get bored of the legal press holding Keystone up as a shining example of a listed law firm. It's a completely different business model to the likes of DWF or Gateley and parasitic. Their Principals built their client books off the back of getting leads and assistance that traditional law firms provide. Keystone hasn't done any of the hard work or invested the time and money in winning clients and eschews the usual law firm costs such as having desks and office space for most of their personnel and not having to train up future lawyers, pay SQE fees and grants, pay external recruitment consultants or have PSLs.
That said, I don't have anything against the firm or its lawyers. It works well for some.
If the Government goes through with its plans to relax restrictive covenants, it will be boom time for Keystone, Gunner Cooke, Spencer West and others.
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Personal injury isn’t for everyone.
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The book of business doesn't have to be huge. Just enough to wash your face I.e. 750k plus p/a
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deffo not the case that most of these smokers are bringing in that
that’s one deal, for me
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They have a calculator where you plug in your specifics and they spin you a yarn.
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Lz, you are still doing law mate? Take your following, become an ep, somewhere or join keystone et al and keep most of the cash, why don't you...
Or you happy in being a well paid staffer for a while..
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Luv to see u bossing keystone sun. Your legal career is preferred reading. I don’t want it to end.
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Clients go to keystone because they don’t want to pay big rates - that used to be the marketing line - we don’t have juniors or trainees.
Isn’t a lot of banking work basically done by juniors and trainees?
which panels are they on?
Who will run your cp checklist?
Are they investing in tech?
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their juniors are chatGPT
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If your clients are SMEs and they don't need a huge team to service them, keystone is ace. But as soon as you get into the clients who care more about getting the job done well than getting it done cheaply, keystone fails.
I also had a pal who used a guy at keystone. It went brilliantly, until he has a deal that needed about 5 lawyers on it. Keystone failed to resource it with a team who weren't z-grade so he dumped them midway through.
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How is it that despite all the frothing every single time lax actually looks into anything past the end of his nose it’s revealed he has absolutely no idea how the world works at all? If you want to know how Keystone works fat lad why don’t you just ask them? Conversely if, as you assert, you are so pre eminent in your field with such a detailed knowledge of where your specialist offering fits in why do you even need to ask in the first place?
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presumably most of these smokers just make up the size of their “book” when they join
there’s no way most of the guys listed in my area are landing a quarter of a lion a year
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Heh! Cookie rolls out the old “i am old bearded guy who knows fook all, so I am going to sneer at others for asking questions” guff. Pull the other one m88 it auto-reports you to the SRA for indolence
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the apparent near total lack of juniors puts me off keystone completely tbh
they advertise “not having to spend your time supervising” as a plus fgs! The only fee earning I want to do is supervising…
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You can have juniors laz- however you need to support them from the outset. Which is difficult unless you have guaranteed x amount from clients. Imagine even in that case may need to take out a loan?
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He’s right to recognise my pre-eminence in my own tiny niche, however. At a technical level, probably the city’s leading practitioner. In billing terms it’s probably someone at some mental american shop, but we all know those guys are content-free shouters and shutters. I get things right.
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TBH, every time I look at Keystone, I think it looks like more of an arse ache than starting one’s own small firm. They seem to offer little in exchange for the amount they skim off your fees.
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I’m not remotely sneering you frothing gibbon. You are, as ever, ignorant and co-dependant.
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sneering is literally your only life or professional skill m8
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you are a joke to all who know you, professionally or personally
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The boundary to starting your own firm is insurance. You need it to start. Most insurers are not interested. The premiums and other compliance requirements will mean your admin is insane.
keystone and the like give you the platform - but it’s more of an advisory play than transactional imho. I have two friends who’ve been there for years and like it.
Laz - have your explore in house? You could boss being a GC
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Isn’t the reality that your sense of entitlement convinces you that you should be making wads of cash for doing nothing as well as roffing all day about it?
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Laz there's no point making up your book because you're alef employed and paid solely a (large) percentage of what you bill.
If you don't bill anything you don't get paid anything.
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And if you don't bill enough to meet the overheads they'll boot you quickly.
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No Amit, but you do get a business card that says partner and with that, you can go out and find revenue.
How long’s it going to take? No longer than it would take any other new business to become revenue generative. A few months?
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snippo, maybe so re insurance m88 but new firms get started
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surely you just write them a cheque for the overheads while you’re in roll out mode
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Try one of the others then laz
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They take the overheads out of your fee income. I don't actually know what happens of you uave no billings tbh.
The guys I know there started a while back with about 500k of regular repeat work so were billing from day one. For that you got paid 300k p/a and one of them was able to get the hours down working 6am to 10am and 4pm to 6pm.
He got to do a lot of school pick ups, Bath times and golfing.
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I think keystone prob works fine tbh if you fib about your book, don’t mind paying your way for a while, are happy not to have any juniors and do everything yourself, etc. It probably does work better for advisory lawyers.
I am not really attracted to these models (Axiom as well) that cream off your earnings in exchange for not much. If I went solo it would be a proper law firm, SRA regulated yes, insured yes, with plush offices yes yes
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they must have a model for coping with people not collecting for reasonably significant periods
on most long commercial projects you’ll be billing at intervals of three months, if not longer, or even just at completion
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Safety net isn't it? I think a few then properly jump to sole practitioners/teams
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They will know better than me. Get in touch and let us know what they say.
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"they must have a model for coping with people not collecting for reasonably significant periods'
Presumably they don't pay you until collection
I know a few of them operate like this. So you essentially become BD, lawyer, cashiers and enforcement
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The model of eat what you kill is you don’t kill you don’t eat. Not hard for most people to understand.
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If you aint billing and collecting, in relatively quick order I imagine they will " get rid of you" No reason why they wouldn't.
So Laz are you going to start your own firm.
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Being a sole practitioner is a right balls ache. The admin these days is huge and PI costs are massive. If you need a PC but otherwise can basically run your own show then I suspect Keystone works fine. For sure a lot of people (including some of this parish) have used it pretty successfully to bridge the move to running their own firm. It let's you build a proper reputation/book with less risk and more ability to just jump back into a proper firm if it doesn't work out for you (without the headache of winding up a firm with run off PI to cover etc).
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But as Laz says, most people don't have a big book of business when they start
They start then win the business - that will take a few months at least, even with a good targeted marketing and BD effort
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I know a few people who were chucked out of my firm in failing practice areas and ended up at similar places. As far as I'm aware they didn't take a single client
But they are all still in place and seemingly doing ok
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It used to be the case that to be a partner anywhere you had to grasp how the business was run but with the odd exception above that appears now to be long gone.
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Yes most people in city firms get partnership without ever winning a single client
Then they naturally assimilate them
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laz - with the types of deals you do, and the risk of not getting paid (when the banks decide that they wont insist that their client pays your fees when a deal craters), its a big ask to be funding operating costs and salary costs. Banking teams run with crazy lock up in most firms. Even someone with their eye on the ball when it comes to admin and costs woudl struggle to keep a banking team's lock up sensible in a big firm.
You are best off finding a firm that has just lost some partners - and offer to go in as a partner but with a rem discussion at the end of the year based on performance.
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A lot of the costs in running a business like Keystone and its competitors are fairly fixed and above a minimum size the marginal cost of adding another lawyer is a sum not entirely unadjacent to fook all. You're not provided with a fixed seat in an office and you're not paying 1/4 of the cost of a PA either. There's not much incentive to get rid of you if you bill low providing you are a net contributor after your marginal cost, especially when they are still looking to add numbers. You don't get paid until the client pays the bill, that's the whole point.
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I spoke with them a few years ago. It was all very hard sell. Their paradigm was some ex MC big swinging d...
...inosaur who had taken away some big ticket thibg and had a
sweatshopbig team ofparablozzasdedicated juniors churning away in agrotty rat filled rent an officesuite of bespoke private rooms0
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Sounds gash. You leave pp to join pp wfh.
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So assume you accepted Wang lol!
Isn't the big benefit with them admin, compliance and especially insurance is taken care of.
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It's great for stuff like conveyancing where you've got a constant churn and bills coming through every month and most of the time are just working on your own. Definitely on my radar as a step towards retirement where I could keep working for certain favoured clients and earn nearly as much as I do now for half the work. If I could guarantee my current level of work on moving I'd almost double my take home pay.
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From a client perspective they're not actually particularly cheap and capacity/availability is very patchy. Short of having a mate there, I can't think of any reason to use them over a local firm. Maybe they do well selling into SMEs with no legal functions? (It's how they got on our books before I joined).
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Sorry meant to say as a conveyancing sole practitioner you can't get access to mortgage lender panels which rather restricts the work you can do especially dealing with the sort of clients who get a mortgage because they can afford to pay cash but can get a better return by putting their cash into their own investment fund.
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I suspect it works well, where a pice of work only requires the input of 1 or 2 people. So real estate, litigation of most kinds, some ECM work, tax stuff, employment, seems ideal.
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banking work pays in the end, far more surely than working for SMEs does
even for pass thru work it’s the institution that’s contractually on the hook to pay you
they almost always do
indeed I’ve never seen a proper FI not do so, although they may negotiate hard on discount, abort etc
banks don’t tend to default on their financial obligations, it’s seen as bad for business
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and fvck it, no matter how hungry you got in the meantime, you could eat a looooooooy of good stuff on 60% of the kind of bill laz drops
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We as a firm ditched working for one lender as the fees their borrowers were willing to pay meant we only recovered about 30% of our time on most of their transactions.
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Can't help thinking that the marketing team was asleep when someone came up with the name 'Keystone' in relation to a law firm. Too close to 'Keystone Kops' for my liking.
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750k from one deal? Fck me.
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that was a restructuring tbf tbf
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m8s r8 available tho
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That's pretty low ball for restructuring tbf. You'll easily rack up a couple of bar on big fellas.
course as clubbers is in PE he will know this first hand sooner or later...
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restructuring makes more sense. obviously we never need their services.
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DON'T THINK OF IT AS INSOLVENCY, THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH
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the title makes me think you might be an undercover skaven.
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I know someone that does v well out of these types of arrangement, typically advising management on exits. You can get juniors and trainees/paralegals.
Ultimately US jokers operate on almost this model, as they have one massively overworked associate and some clueless gimp with stellar academics but zero practical training copying and pasting deal docs and firing out outdated precedents from their old firms.
TBH you should be able to automate about 75% of an average M&A/Finance deal, but nobody can face paying the upfront cost, likely £2-5m, and telling the client to do things in a way that enables this in exchange for 60% of the usual legal fees and 100% of the sleep deprived basic fook up removed.
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Heh @ plush offices.
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I know quite a few people who have gone there over the years. Most of them had fading practices.
Some don't stay that long because it's hard to get new referrals. You really need to consistently work your existing book of business (their lawyers are allowed to have consultancy roles at other firms on the side though).
Say you're a partner or legal director with a modest £230k book of business. Unless you take a partner role where your new firm can otherwise keep you busy, in London if you want to move as a partner, you may be looking at an income of circa £100-120k at a lower mid-tier firm, not much more than a senior associate at such firm. At Keystone, you'd get about £160k.
I mention £230k as this seems quite close to their actual numbers. Keystone Law's latest accounts report average revenue per "Principal" (partners and similar) as £190k. That's comfortably lower than revenue per partner stats at every other Top 200 UK law firm. But then they don't have to use any of that revenue to pay associates, trainees, paralegals, BD staff, rent, etc. It mostly goes in your pocket. You do have to do the work yourself, however, which is a limiting factor, depending on how hard you want to work.
(I know they tell prospective joiners that they can pay colleagues to help them but I doubt this goes much beyond very junior colleagues. When all you have is your book of business you likely wish to protect it zealously.)
Keystone also makes sense for partners whose expertise and client base has become so niche that they've reached a career dead end and can't meaningfully increase revenue year on year.
And then there are those who like the independence, ability to choose their hours and not having to deal with partner politics and partnership admin.
I do get bored of the legal press holding Keystone up as a shining example of a listed law firm. It's a completely different business model to the likes of DWF or Gateley and parasitic. Their Principals built their client books off the back of getting leads and assistance that traditional law firms provide. Keystone hasn't done any of the hard work or invested the time and money in winning clients and eschews the usual law firm costs such as having desks and office space for most of their personnel and not having to train up future lawyers, pay SQE fees and grants, pay external recruitment consultants or have PSLs.
That said, I don't have anything against the firm or its lawyers. It works well for some.
If the Government goes through with its plans to relax restrictive covenants, it will be boom time for Keystone, Gunner Cooke, Spencer West and others.
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