Rebel with a cause: Q and A with Lindsay Healy

Lindsay Healy is behind Aria Grace Law, an award-winning fee-share firm that pays lawyers 90% of the fees they bill and donates all its profits to charity. The firm is growing and expanding internationally. How was Aria Grace conceived, and how does it operate? Healy tells LPM in this Q and A.

Aria Grace Law is a Community Interest Company (CIC) which means it ensures that all its profits go to charity, and it’s regulated by the Office of the Regulator of Community Interest Companies. The firm itself is not regulated by the SRA, but individually, its lawyers are. Its services range from banking and finance law to commercial property and data protection.

Q. Aria Grace Law operates a fee-share model. Why did you choose this model?

A. Well, I was a corporate finance lawyer for Norton Rose Fulbright, and then I went in-house to become a general counsel at a FTSE 250 company, and I’ve been involved in the City in law and the entire legal ecosystem for more than 26 years.

I’ve seen an awful lot of how business is run. When I set up Aria Grace, I wanted to join a law firm that I would want to join. I set up the firm so that it would be something very different from my experience of all the bad ‘isms’ in law — sexism, racism, ageism, elitism — all the negative connotations that can come with a typical pyramidal structure.

Broadly speaking, the pyramid structure at large law firms means a group of very small, privileged people at the top of the organisation, primarily men, mostly white [Healy points at himself], with occasional people of colour and women.

The pyramid structure only suits very few people. Women struggle with that particular model, and so do many other people and it’s got detrimental effects on health, wellbeing and ability to perform optimally. The gender pay gap was getting bigger and still exists. When you asked people what they were doing about it, the answer was that we’re lobbying law firms and governments.

You’re asking people to change a methodology that works best for them. My view is that if firms wanted to have equal pay, they would have it now — you wouldn’t need to have a committee.

In the pyramid structure, I’m down here, and I want something from you up here. That means you’ve got control over me, and power can be very manipulative. But people often want more money and higher positions. They want to improve. Why? Because they want to create more money for their family, wellbeing, and life, which is a great sign. But they have to then play by different rules in that infrastructure.

 Q. What about other firms that also consider their employees to be their most valuable assets and operate a fee-share model? 

A. Right, that’s supposed to be that “we value our employees”. But if you think about an employee as an asset — an asset is there to be sweated and monetised and to create a return for the people at the top.

I started looking at some of those other structures and struggled to determine why they were still taking 30% or 25% away from their workforce, and to my mind that became a bit more like your typical pyramid structure — again, it was: “We’re going to take some money from all these people, and we’re going to use it to create big wealth for the people at the top.”

I decided early on that we would pay our lawyers 90% of the fees they bill their clients. All lawyers, including junior lawyers, receive 90% of the fees they charge their clients.  I’m also a lawyer at Aria Grace. And the reason to do that was twofold: because I think it’s fair, and because I would attract top-quality lawyers so that I could go and do the thing that I was really interested in — which was using the rest of that money for social good, and that’s something I don’t think any firms are doing enough about yet.

So, if we’ve built a model where you’re paying your lawyers 90% of the fee — because they get paid so much of their fee proportionately, they can afford to charge their clients less and still get paid more. You can charge your clients less than someone who is getting paid 70% of the fee.

With the remaining money, we pay for overheads. Then, we give all the rest of the funds to charity, and we give money to groups like food banks, Radical Recruit, an organisation that works to get people with barriers to work into secure employment and many more.

When you retire from Aria Grace Law, you will get 10% of what your former clients were billed at the firm for the rest of your life. So, if your clients are being billed £1m a year through the firm, when you’ve retired, you will get £100,000 every year for the rest of your life.

Q. What were some of the challenges you faced when setting up the business?

A. Well, everybody thought I was mad. I couldn’t explain it to anyone in a way that would help them see the benefits of this model. The whole concept of a corporate commercial law firm making lots of money, just to give it away, was completely alien to everybody. I had to invest in the firm, create it, persuade people that something with no track record was the right thing, and convince clients to come on board with a completely different firm.

Aria Grace started with one lawyer — that was me — and two clients, one of which was pro bono. We’re now at 45 lawyers, and we’ve got 14 people looking to come on board [at the time of the interview in July].

Q. What’s in the future for Aria Grace Law? 

A. I think Aria Grace has got to grow to become a significant disruptor in the market — we’re still small, and we’re only five years old. It’s about parity, making sure that irrespective of your creed, culture, beliefs, orientation, or gender, we want all those things that you are. We want our workforce to represent society.

If people think this is the sort of thing that should be disrupting the market, they’ll want to join or replicate this model. A group of Italian lawyers who’ve been following us for years told us they love the model. Could we franchise it to them? We said, well, just copy it. You don’t need to franchise it. It’s not ours — it’s about fairness and kindness. Aria Grace Italia was born.

We’re doing first deals in Dubai — we’ve got many people on board from the Gulf Cooperation Council territories, and we’re expanding there. It’s like the philosophy has landed in different jurisdictions.

Q. What advice would you give to others interested in adopting this model?

A. The number one thing about running a business like ours is that you’ve got to be transparent. And you’ve got to be good at what you do as a law firm. We’re doing corporate deals and going toe to toe with large firms. We can do that because they’re made up of people like us.

Clients will really want to help you — they love what we’re doing. Lawyers can see the value — they can make a great life for themselves and contribute to society. Charities constantly refer work back into your business, because that feeds back into them, and that’s the ecosystem. When you’re sharing across a much wider spectrum, it actually trickles down.