Holistic and charismatic – Daly is a rare breed of lawyer

She’s the charismatic partner and strategy board member in the Manchester office of national law firm Browne Jacobson, which last month moved offices from Piccadilly to Spinningfields.

Employment law specialist Kerren Daly is one of those people with whom chatting for an hour is a truly uplifting experience.

She is certainly no member of any ‘bill-them-and-forget-them’ lawyer-hood. She sits on several worthy committees and trusts, including Manchester Action on Street Health, Young People’s Support Foundation (recently taken over by homeless charity Centrepoint in London), and the CBI Regional Council.

Daly has insight into the latest developments in employment law, including issues relating to sham applicants, modern slavery statements, gender pay reporting and how the UK’s decision to leave the EU will impact employment legislation in the future.

What shines through in the Australian-born but South Africa and Ireland-raised lawyer is both her humanity and humility.

“I help organisation treat people fairly,” she said. “When it comes to very senior individuals, I’m not sure if there is an element of fairness to it.

“If the relationship’s over, that’s when I come in. If I get a call from a company saying ‘our CEO’s got to go’, I help them do it with some dignity and respect.

“What happens sometimes is people treat other people really badly and then they wonder why they kick back.”

Daly has journeyed long to find a law firm which shares her values.

Born in Melbourne to Irish parents who went Down Under on one of those £10 passages, she ended up being schooled in a Jewish area of Johanesburg under Apartheid for 11 years before her family moved back to Cork in Ireland when she was 12.

That globetrotting background got her used to being an outsider, and you sense that’s spawned an inner strength.

“When I was in South Africa, I was a Christian girl in a Jewish district and in Cork, I was this fair-haired girl with a South African accent in an area where the was little diversity.”

She ended up in England in the 1980s after getting a degree in – of all things – chemistry in Ireland.

Realising hanging round laboratories and test tubes wearing a white coat wasn’t for her, Daly ended up doing a law degree and a masters at the University of Westminster and King’s College London.

Her law career started in the Crown Prosecution Service, but she said: “I couldn’t see myself prosecuting for the rest of my life.”

She went on: “I decided I wanted to work in the private sector for a law firm, and then effectively, someone senior at Eversheds saw me at some competition and asked me to go in.

“They put forward for a training contract in London before I got offered a job in Manchester (in the 1990s) and I’ve been here ever since. I like to think I’m an honorary Northerner.

“England is my home, but it’s a bit like being (famous Britain-loving American author) Bill Bryson, with his observations about the British.

“I’m the insider, but also the outsider, often the observer. It make me laugh, but it often makes me despair about how the Northerners go on about the Southerners and the Southerners go on about the Northerners.

“And I’m stuck in the middle, thinking ‘but you’re all English’.”

Daly has been with Browne Jacobson for two-and-a-half years. The Manchester office, where 50 people now work, had already been open for two years when she arrived.

“There is this understanding in the company that you’re never going to be a truly national law firm unless you’ve got a presence in the North West,” she said.

Daly hailed Browne Jacobson’s “personal touch” USP.

She went on: “People really care about the clients they are working for. A lot of law firms bring in a lot of work then just put bums on seats.

“If you understand the basics of good service and good value, people will come back. It’s very simple. A lot of law firms think they’re Nike or Coca Cola, that it’s about the name above the door, but it’s not. It’s about the people who are delivering the service.

“That’s what we’ve got at Browne Jacobson. It doesn’t have to take over the world, or be international. It’s about being a really good national law firm.”

Although Daly loves her present role she is not standing still, and has ambitions to become more of a “commercial persona” and less of a lawyer with aspirations to take on some non-executive directorships.

Her appetite for this has been whetted by her involvement with the CBI.

“I love it because it’s about meeting business leaders and understand their challenges and their opportunities and that enables me to bring that back to the business and for us to give better legal advice,” she said.

“It’s a bit like (being) a doctor. If you come in and I don’t know you, I can give you a prescription. But if I’ve known you for a few years, I can be more holistic.

“It’s the same with law. To be a really effective lawyer, you really need to understand your client and the sector and you need to give holistic advice. I don’t think a lot of lawyers think like that.”

To this end, Daly believes the more senior lawyers get, they need to spot when other issues are involved and where and when other people need to be brought in. As I get more experience I become like an in-house counsel.

She said: “Someone might say ‘I know you’re an employment lawyer, Kerren, but can I just run this past you?’ I might not be able to help, as in, I don’t know the answer. I can tell them what I might think or what my gut tells me, but I know someone who will be able to help you. And then I start connecting people.

“You know how often people talk about the power of referrals. That’s what I often do. Sometimes there’s nothing in it for me or Browne Jacobson. A lot of lawyers are transactional. Unless you’re giving them a job and you’re paying, it’s a transaction. I don’t see it as a transaction, I see it as a relationship.

“There might not be something in it for me right now, but at some point, it’ll come back.”

Her philosophy has been underpinned by an experience she had a few years ago indelibly printed on her memory when she went to a conference being addressed by a futurologist – someone who has done all the research and is able to indicate where organisations are headed – whose clients were Apple and Google.

She said: “At first I thought, is this mumbo jumbo stuff? Then he said something that I’ve never forgotten.

“He said if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go further, go together.

“In other words, if you want to have a really successful business, you’ve got to work with others. You’ve got to spot people who think like you and make introductions.”