Video insight into working with clients

My name is Fergus Gallagher. I’m an associate in the Corporate group and I’ve been with Hogan Lovells for five and a half years. I think clients come to us for a number of reasons: they come to us for the quality of work that we do, they come to us because of the wealth of practice; we can be a one stop shop where people can come in and we can do their corporate work and we can do finance work, we can do their property work, pensions work. They come to us because we have got international reach – if they’ve got operations in the Netherlands and France and Spain, the US, the Far East, we can service their needs throughout their global network. I think they come to us because we understand their business, that’s why people come back to us. Once we have got the client and we’ve shown that we do understand their business, I think clients don’t want to leave us because they realise that we understand them. They realise that that’s not something that they’re going to get with another firm immediately.

I think the key thing is to become your client’s trusted advisor, the person that they go to. With every client you’re trying to build that relationship and I think as a lawyer that’s really all you can do. You’ve got to build that trust; you’ve got to keep that trust with everything that you do. You’ve got to make sure it’s at the highest level because one small slip can break that trust. So that’s your main aim as a lawyer, you’ve got to become a trusted advisor for as many clients as you can, so whenever they have got a piece of work, you are their go-to man.