The apprenticeship reforms were introduced to put quality at the forefront of training and skills improvement and to give employers more control over developing their workforce. At Browne Jacobson we have been doing just that. Our existing legal apprentices follow the paralegal standards and our plans for 2018 include recruitment of a further 12 paralegal apprentices in September, together with developing many of our own teams by offering apprenticeships in business administration, first-line management, chartered manager degrees and senior leaders master’s degrees.

Our ongoing mission is to help our law firm clients use the internet more effectively to grow their business. As such, from an online perspective, we look at every component of the journey their prospects make, from initial internet search to becoming a client, and even beyond that, helping our clients look in more detail at the experience they provide to their clients. We’ve never had any problem generating traffic for their websites. However, rankings and traffic are mere vanity metrics unless site visits are converting into good-quality enquiries which our clients can convert into profitable new business.

Some people think it is easy to run – and to grow – a law firm. I feel like I have had a lifetime in lawyer and team management and in law firm ownership and leadership. Taking all of that experience (of things done right and wrong), add the experience gained from working with a host of law firms since I left private practice, and harnessing the clarity of thought I now enjoy that few managing partners could dream of whilst in the hot seat, I believe I can point to at least 10 pieces of jigsaw that a firm needs to come together – over and above efficient IT and a solid compliance and risk-management framework – to make up the perfect foundations for a high-performance legal business.

Today we celebrate International Women’s Day and on Sunday Mother’s Day, so it seems quite poignant to talk about how my mum spurred me on to follow my dreams of being a lawyer, writes Gill Aitken, general counsel and Solicitor for HM Revenue & Customs. Every one of us have people standing alongside us to support, encourage and (sometimes) push us along the road to success. Unfortunately for my mum, her own career was cut short because of archaic rules and legislation that prevented married women from working in the civil service.

It was the weekend and I found myself sat in a room full of barristers and judges, a little too much like how I spend some of my weekdays. We were gathered for a compulsory training course run by Gray’s Inn for new practitioners (barristers of under four years’ advocacy experience). Most of my group, like me, were on the cusp of going from new to ‘established’ practitioners. Our training included various interim applications for which we had to draft a skeleton argument. The feedback from the trainers on our skeletons stuck with me. We had all written far too much and probably double what was required. I wondered why.