Fox Rodney. Your search ends here.
That’s the message of our recent rebranding at Fox Rodney, because as our business celebrates its 21st anniversary this year, we know we can deliver what is required for success in legal recruitment and search for our clients and our candidates. We have partnered with many great firms and companies and have placed a huge number of talented individuals and teams since I founded the firm with Adrian Fox in 2000. We’re also hugely proud of enabling some of the most complex moves that have shaped market trends in the legal world.
As we welcome our new CEO Tim Hammett – and I move into the Executive Chairman role for the Company – we thought this was the right time to refresh our identity, showcase our strengths and more clearly communicate our many capabilities across the market. And we wanted to make our connections with our clients and candidates as simple and easy as possible, from finding out more about market trends to inform decision making, through our thought leadership to understanding new opportunities in the market when working with our consultants.
We wanted to reflect our confidence in the look and feel of our brand. These may be uncertain times for the business world, but we have ambitious plans to support the legal sector well into the future and have enough first-hand knowledge of market change to navigate around difficulties and consistently achieve excellence in legal recruitment.
So here we are with a new, brighter look, a contemporary and informative website and messaging that we hope cuts right through to what really counts when clients are choosing their recruitment team.
Where we come from
We hope that our new brand conveys a self-belief that comes from our depth of expertise. Since we launched in 2000, we have made hundreds of partner moves, both individuals and teams. In fact, our record for successfully placing teams has grown year on year and we have gained a strong reputation for overcoming potential pitfalls in these major moves.
We hold the record for one of the largest team moves ever secured in the UK law firm sector. That the lead Partner in that team is now the firm’s Global CEO says something about how we work: we’ve never been a business that wants market churn, we’re committed to making placements which last. We wanted this message to be a powerful part of our new brand.
Internally too, we’ve changed as the market has moved on. As firms have grown and become more global, so have we: opening offices in Paris, Dublin, Munich & Frankfurt, developing a desk dedicated to serve Milan and Rome from our London office and also recently brokering high profile lateral moves and office moves in the Middle East and Asia, together with establishing highly effective associate relationships particularly in Asia. International moves have become part of our DNA, linked intrinsically to our one-firm, one-team approach.
In particular, we have watched, and, more importantly, played a big part in, the rise and rise of US firms in the London market to the point where they now dominate in certain key practice areas. And as we have grown, so we have been able to recruit many other key recruiters who now have become leaders in their respective areas/locations: Siobhán Lewington has been a key driver of our business in London, as has more recently Jonny Fort, who heads our London Partner team. Portia White has become a dominant presence in the Dublin market and most recently we welcomed Helmut Rogalla and Jan Heuser to set up our Munich and Frankfurt offices. Our Paris office, now led by Simon Benoit and Romain Heriaud, also continues to thrive.
We are a relationship-driven firm, so our brand values are ‘trust, bespoke, driven’. We are partners to our clients – perhaps no better example of this is the number of times we have placed candidates who have been promoted to more senior roles and then become our clients, asking us to support their recruitment needs. They are close and lasting contacts, who know how we work and that we will do our utmost to deliver exactly what is required, no matter how challenging the brief.
Looking forwards and thank you…
2020 was obviously a tumultuous year for everyone. With the first lockdown, none of us knew how everything would pan out. But business has to go on and it did. We shifted quickly to supporting virtual processes and placements made via Zoom. Indeed we’re confident we made the first Zoom only partner placement in the UK market back in May. And we fast adapted to support whatever face-to-face meetings were necessary once lockdown conditions eased. Agility became our watchword. We were delighted to see the legal sector prove its typical resilience, out-performing expectations (US firms doing particularly well).
Internally too, we shifted mindset. We strongly support flexibility and have enabled our staff to work from home as needs be. This year has shown us what you can achieve with an open mind – years in business should never translate to rigid thinking. We hope this too is apparent in our dynamic looking new brand.
As our CEO Tim Hammett joins us, we embark on a new road ahead. It felt like the right time to welcome fresh blood and new ideas. Previously, Tim was Managing Partner of Norman Broadbent Board and Executive Search. As such, he becomes our first external CEO appointment, bringing us a different perspective as we begin the next stage in our business evolution.
We hope our new brand, with its vibrant design and clear messaging brings all this experience and vision together.
We could not have done any of this without you, our clients (and candidates). Some of you we have dealt with for many, many years which has been amazing for us. Others of you we have been more recent additions to the Fox Rodney experience. Whichever you are, we thank you for you support and assistance throughout the years.
And as we continue through 2021, we are hugely excited for the future, not just for ourselves but for all those with whom we partner to achieve growth. We hope to speak with you very soon.
By Stephen Rodney, Executive Chairman