Blake Morgan's Kath Shimmin on inspiring the next generation of leaders

How does a business develop and encourage the next generation into leadership roles? 

For Kath Shimmin, chair of South Coast based national law firm Blake Morgan, it’s a challenge she and her Board are tackling head on. 

“How do we embrace the changes we need to make to maintain the years of knowledge and experience our board and senior team can offer clients, while nurturing those earlier in their career so they’re ready to take over when the time comes?” 

The first challenge of managing the next generation’s expectations is understanding them, says Kath. “I spend a lot of time in our offices listening and talking. We have young professionals who are bright, ambitious, very well informed, with great acumen but raised in a completely different way to those of my age. 

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“They expect to be recognised and promoted at a pace that we didn’t enjoy. The challenge for management is how to give them recognition in their roles while getting them to the levels of skills and experience to be ready to take on the business.” 

Such conversations cover skills development and technology, but also harder issues to tackle such as equality, diversity, inclusivity and working practices, she said, and in the last few years, the firm has drawn up policies for many situations. However, the real challenge comes in their implementation.  

“Policies are useless unless they're rolled out properly,” she added. “The key is to ensure good lines of communication between those leading the business and those who are developing their careers with us.” 

Changing career expectations  

Kath, who took on the role as chair at Blake Morgan in 2021, has adapted her view of climbing the career ladder. “It has taken me almost 40 years to know my trade and feel really confident in my abilities. But for the next generation there’s a whole different assumption about the pace of career progression, and the time spent on monotonous work which can now be done by software, or indeed about spending their lives in just one career.” 

She understands these expectations and the firm already deploys new technology where appropriate. 

“There’s no reason why a client should pay someone to do what legal software can do. What’s important is critical thinking – how do you weight this option against that? How do you analyse risk in an emotionally intelligent way because artificial intelligence can’t do that – and may never be able to. 

“I have done deals where the emotional piece for a client was more important. Perhaps we agreed to give away good commercial points because an owner wanted employees looked after when their business had been sold. 

“Blake Morgan’s training contracts help develop our people into what they can and want to be, but that takes an enormous amount of our trainers' time, including working with individuals one-to-one.” 

“Don’t make me do that” 

Kath didn’t always want to be a lawyer, and her parents rather hoped she’d be a doctor. “But I was watching a medical programme on the TV and when it got to a particularly gory bit I thought ‘I don’t want to do that’.” 

She didn’t want to disappoint her parents and felt that if she couldn’t save lives in the truest sense of the word, perhaps she could help make them better as a lawyer. 

She was accepted at King’s College London. “King’s taught by asking us to undertake critical analysis and write judgements, explaining our reasoning. I loved it – the cut and thrust of debate. We had a particularly bumptious professor and tried to find cases in the library that he wouldn’t have read to wrong foot him on points of law.” 

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But she didn’t find it easy. “At King’s I was one of just two state school students in an intake of 70, and that was a challenge when I started going for interviews in my third year.” 

London law firm Slaughter and May spotted her talent and she accepted their offer. 

She loved training as a city lawyer. “I spent my whole property seat deducing title to an air ventilation unit for the new Charing Cross Station. It sounds nerdy but it was fascinating – based on an indenture written on vellum going back to 1780. Then, when I was working on intellectual property, I answered the phone to a man representing the international teddy bear club. I thought it was a joke, but it was a genuine client.” 

As a trainee lawyer, she spent time in all departments, and after qualifying, she worked in corporate sales and acquisitions, including on the British Steel privatisation. 

“By the time I was four years qualified, I was doing asset securitisation, we acted on the very first mortgage securitisation in the late 80s. It was an exciting time and a new area of law so sometimes we had to make things up as we went along.” 

There are no half measures in a legal career 

Marriage and family arrived, along with the inevitable choices that a woman must make. “I wanted to balance work and family but when I returned to mortgage securitisation four months later, I quickly realised there were no half measures in that kind of work.” 

Decisions had to be made, but that didn’t mean her abandoning her career. “My husband is a research scientist. His world is as busy, if not busier than mine, but ours is a marriage of equals – we both wanted to build our careers.” 

The solution came by moving out of London, and they chose the south coast as her husband Matthew was from Guernsey, and Kath grew up on the Isle of Wight. 

She got a job at Blake Lapthorn, and initially commuted from London until their house was sold. Matthew got a job at Portsmouth University, where he still works.  

There were still compromises to make, but Blake Lapthorn, which finally became Blake Morgan in 2014, were great, she said. Kath became an equity partner in 2001 and while she was on maternity leave with her second child, she was promoted to junior partner. 

Over the next 20 years she rose through the firm, founding and running the banking team. Her role gave her influence because of the team she ran, coupled with her experience and personality. 

Setting an example to female colleagues 

So, when the incumbent chair expressed his intention to step down, she initially didn’t consider running. 

“I was already having the say I wanted in the areas I felt strongly about, but then I began to engage with the growing equity, diversity and inclusivity agenda. When one of my colleagues asked why I wasn’t standing, I realised that I’d talked about female ambition and women putting themselves forward, but at the first opportunity I got, I wasn’t jumping in.” 

So she did. “I felt that it was important the women in the firm saw that I was prepared to do it.” 

Two years into the role, and the gender balance at Blake Morgan is changing. “35 per cent of full equity partners are women, and we are aiming to get the balance to 50:50 by 2025. But we must manage with the talent pool available within the legal profession, and no women wants to be there just because she’s a woman. Only three out of eight Board members are women, so that needs work too”. 

Reflecting on her hugely successful career, she still says she never thought she would be the sort of person to chair a major UK law firm. “But my age and experience has made me comfortable about who I am and the way I manage – though all of us can always learn better management skills.  

“Blake Morgan turns over more than £61 million. We want to grow, but in the right way, working for businesses and the people that own and run them. We have our head office on the South Coast, but have offices in London, Cardiff, Reading and Oxford from which we service national clients. We have a big commitment to the communities we operate in, and part of our ambition is to remain connected to them.” 

Living and working on the South Coast suits the girl from the Isle of Wight. “When I gave up rugby years ago, we bought a boat. It’s the perfect relaxation from a demanding job.  

When you are on and running the boat, you can’t think about anything else.”