Sherwood expands Bar Consultancy Team

Sherwood has announced that from 17 November they are fielding a team of four specialist consultants to the Bar – Simon McCall, Claire Collins, Julian Boardman-Weston and Kate Blackburn. McCall and Boardman-Weston are experienced management consultants who have practised as lawyers and are part of the faculty for the MBA in Legal Practice at Nottingham Law School. Blackburn and Collins have both worked as chambers’ Chief Executives. They all have masters degrees in business to complement their practical experience. Each has different skills that can be brought together to help clients for a specific project or at differing stages of an on-going project. From strategy to marketing, mergers to structure, interim support to specialist projects, know-how management to practice development, Sherwood has the expertise to help chambers maximise their effectiveness.

The members of Sherwood PSF Consulting Ltd have provided consultancy services to the legal marketplace, including barristers’ chambers, for many years.

Simon McCall, originally a solicitor in private practice and in-house, helped to research and develop the original Practice Management Standards and Guidelines for chambers and has extensive experience of carrying out consultancy projects and running Chambers’ retreats. He is “very excited at the prospect of expanding the Bar Team in Sherwood to enable us to provide a unique service to chambers at a time when the market place for the Bar is changing so quickly. Claire and Kate have invaluable hands-on experience of working within sets and addressing these challenges.”

From her background in the NHS, then as a Chief Executive in a barristers’ chambers and also as a qualified professional development coach, Claire Collins says “Coaching and personal development of barristers is still quite an alien concept to many practitioners but it can make the difference between moving on to bigger and better work now on your own terms, and just waiting for an opportunity to present itself.”

Kate Blackburn is the Chief Executive of a large multi-disciplinary regional set and has grappled with the time-honoured debate about whether a set should be run by a senior clerk or by a professional manager. “The truth is, each set is different and it just depends on the set’s culture and skills base. No one solution fits all.” Blackburn will continue in her role as a chief executive in the regions and dovetail this with her consultancy role from January 2004. Know-how management is an innovative concept for barristers. So what is it? Know-how is about sharing knowledge or information to avoid the need for individuals to reinvent the wheel. With more and more sets working together in teams, Boardman-Weston’s background in know-how and IT and as a qualified barrister will enable the most forward thinking of sets to stand out from their competitors.