“I couldn’t see the job that I wanted, and that’s the reason that I had to make it for myself”, Bellevue Law founder Florence Brocklesby on her ‘flexible’ firm
Lawyer turned entrepreneur Florence Brocklesby shares her firm’s unique business model, plus her professional insights on the new employment laws.
In entrepreneurial life, attempting to solve a personal problem can lead to a business venture. It goes like this: the budding entrepreneur identifies a problem, solves it, and a business emerges, hopefully.
This is exactly what happened to workplace and disputes lawyer, Florence Brocklesby, who, after taking a break from her legal career to raise her three young children, saw a gap in the market for a firm with a truly flexible work structure, enabling highly qualified female lawyers, who are also mothers, to return to satisfying careers.
“When I looked around wanting to get back into practice, I couldn’t see the kind of legal work that I wanted to do in terms of the quality of work that I wanted to do, but also the flexibility,” she explains. “I couldn’t see the job that I wanted, and that’s the reason that I had to make it for myself.”
A law firm from a garden office
This desire eventually became the London-based Bellevue Law, a firm offering employment practice and commercial disputes resolution for businesses and individuals.
Inspired by an article she read about a female lawyer who had left her city firm and started a legal practice from her kitchen table, Brocklesby did something similar from her garden office in 2014: “I started with a laptop, a basic website designed on a small budget by another South West London mum and some professional indemnity insurance, and that was pretty much what I had on day one.”
Next, she reached out to past contacts. “There was a fear of embarrassment if I then had to email back a few months later to say that it didn’t work. But I was pleasantly surprised at how enormously supportive everybody was. And the first few cases came in from friends of friends and former colleagues referring.”
Early clients also came via one of the most organic networking forms for mothers, the school gates. “I was dropping my daughter, who must have been five or six, to school, and on three separate occasions, people approached me, other mums, other working professional mums, to say that they’d heard I was an employment lawyer and they needed employment advice, and sadly, that’s not an uncommon story for working professional mothers. Then, clients referred other clients.”
Today, Bellevue Law boasts an incredibly high Net Promoter Score, a metric used to measure customer loyalty, satisfaction and the extent to which customers would recommend it to others. Here, it currently holds a ninety-one out of one-hundred rating. Its talent retention rate is also similarly high; out of the thirty-two lawyers they’ve hired in the past twelve years, twenty-five remain with the firm.
Those who can work more get compensated for it by earning a share of the fees, which, according to Brocklesby, is more generous than the usual hourly rate for larger firms. “It’s a fairer system,” she concludes.
Brocklesby recognised the “extraordinary pool of talent at the school gates” early on; mothers who’d had successful legal careers but then faced the “binary choice” of having to give it up to have children or to remain as practising lawyers.
The firm’s employment model is also good news for clients after experienced counsel; a majority of its lawyers have an average post-qualification experience of around twenty years.
In fact, one of Brocklesby’s first hires was a Magic Circle lawyer. “She’s an absolutely brilliant lawyer, and just by offering her very flexible working arrangements, I was able to recruit her to a law firm based in my garden office. And that made me realise that I might be onto something in terms of the model.” The lawyer in question remains at Bellevue Law, some twelve years later.
Recruiting and working differently
Flexible working is a term that is thrown about a lot, but as Brocklesby reminds us, it can mean more than location. At Bellevue Law, lawyers have flexibility over the amount of work they do. This is achieved through a self-employed and fee-share model. “I have one lawyer, for example, who chose to step back from working for a while while she had children going through A-Levels and GCSEs and then came back again and started working harder after that. I’ve also had periods in my life where I’ve had quite significant caring responsibilities alongside running the firm, where I’ve had to do less work and then have come back, and been able to do more work, so I’ve got my own experience of the benefits of flexibility.”
Those who can work more get compensated for it by earning a share of the fees, which, according to Brocklesby, is more generous than the usual hourly rate for larger firms. “It’s a fairer system,” she concludes.
Bellevue Law also helps its business clients prepare for future legal changes, including the new employment laws coming in this year and next. “We’re trying to support clients to get ahead of them, so they’re understanding what their changing obligations will be. Not just in terms of process and contracts and policies and changes to leave rights, for example, but actually, what do you need to be doing in practical terms to get ready for it.”
New employment laws
One example she gives is the changes to the law of unfair dismissal. From January 1 2027, employees, instead of only being able to bring an unfair dismissal claim once they’ve been employed for two years, will be able to bring an unfair dismissal claim once they’ve been employed for six months, and compensation for an unfair dismissal will be uncapped.
She says employers need to be thinking in “quite a granular way” about how to protect themselves from claims. “We are saying to employer clients, you need to tighten up your recruitment processes so that you may be putting in extra steps to make sure that you are hiring the right people in the first place, and you really need to use that six-month period. You might have, for example, a three-month probation period in your contracts, and then you may be able to extend that for a further three months if that’s what you need, if there are issues,” she explains.
“You need to be using that period of time to be proactively managing performance,” she adds. “By that, we don’t really mean firing people quickly. We mean making sure that when you hire someone, you also train them and support them so that they can do their job really well.”
She advises employers not to panic about the change, as only “very highly paid individuals” will likely benefit.
The current cap on unfair dismissal claim compensation is the lower end of a year’s salary at £118,223. “Most people bringing unfair dismissal claims will never come close to hitting the cap anyway,” she adds.
Aside from its inclusivity, flexibility and high retention and approval rates, Bellevue Law has another thing to celebrate: a B-Corp certification. A well-regarded stamp of approval for attaining high social and environmental standards, it has a rigorous application process and Brocklesby believes it has helped the firm attract talent: “We have several applications from people who say that one of the reasons they’re applying to Bellevue Law is because we’re a certified B Corp and it resonates with them from a values point of view.”
The certification also plays into the firm’s work with “purpose-driven clients” and the way it delivers legal advice, explains Brocklesby, which includes advice “with an ethical and a human context” and going further to demonstrate “trust and integrity and fairness.”
So, the core takeaway from sitting down with lawyer-turned-entrepreneur Florence Brocklesby? That while the rule of law is absolute, the way a firm’s lawyers work, get compensated, and deliver services can have a distinctly human element, which is good for people and profit, surely?
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