Powerful lawyer confident of clients’ success

As of this month, DLA Piper is the biggest business law firm in the world.

Sarah Day is the new head of the Leeds office, the firm’s second largest operation.

But, for Ms Day, Leeds is the best office and it is her job to “capture the magic and keep it going”.

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The 45-year-old is now the most powerful female lawyer in Yorkshire and, in an interview with the Yorkshire Post, she spoke about her plans for the role, her views on the current economic environment and what constitutes excellence in business.

Ms Day, who joined the firm from Hammonds in 1998, enjoys the intellectual challenge of law and, more importantly, making things happen.

She plans to focus the office on what she calls public-private axis projects, such as infrastructure work, the technology sector, financial services and geographical regions like China, the West Coast of the United States, Germany, Russia and Ukraine.

The finance lawyer said DLA Piper is “positive but cautious” about the future, a sentiment echoed by most of her firm’s clients.

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She said that unrest in the Middle East, the Japanese nuclear disaster and poor profitability of the banking sector are causes for concern at a macro level.

But at a micro level, she said lots of businesses are enjoying success and reporting increases in profit and solid revenues.

DLA Piper is a main sponsor of the Yorkshire Post Excellence in Business Awards, sponsoring the category for companies with a turnover above £50m.

Within her firm, she said excellence is in client service and client delivery. She added: “There’s no substitute for quality – there’s no such thing as quick and dirty.”

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She said that while DLA Piper enjoys good staff retention, it has “some way to go” as an employer. She added: “We are the sum of our people and we need to work on that.”

Externally, she said a truly excellent business “will have analysed its own business, where it wants to be and how it gets there”.

She said employee engagement and training are also key to achieving excellence in business.

Ms Day emphasised the role that women play in successful companies and said it is “unequivocally true” that women bring different skill sets to business.

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Half of DLA Piper’s new trainees are women, but less than a third of partners are female. This is means the firm is losing a lot of talent, she said.

Ms Day added: “What’s true of law firms is true of engineering firms, it’s true for funders, it’s true for lots of elements of business. If we can keep that talent pool, then business is going to benefit.”

The daughter of maths teachers from Billingham, Teesside, Ms Day studied French and German at New College, Oxford University. She spent a lot of time on medieval German poetry, which was “wonderful but neither use nor ornament”.

She wanted a professional qualification and the more she investigated law, the more she thought it fitted so she applied for law school and converted.

Shift in the world of mergers

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THE professional services community of Leeds is witnessing a significant shift in the nature of mergers and acquisitions activity.

Jonathan Proctor, who is the head of DLA Piper’s corporate group in Leeds, said: “It’s starting to get a different context. It’s different from everybody doing the management buyout of the sprocket manufacturer down the road.”

Instead, he said activity is being driven by “large, cash-rich international corporates seeing a good environment in the UK for doing deals”.

His team completed 65 transactions with a combined value of around £8bn in the last year, covering many different legal jurisdictions.