When I catch up with Mike Scott ahead of his appointment on 1 May as senior partner of Cripps Pemberton Greenish – the Kent and London-based law firm at which he trained in the mid-1990s – it is clear that, despite the challenges of the past 12 months, he is in a happy place.
“It means everything to me,” he says of his appointment. “I, for a long time, just wanted to become a partner. Then as soon as I became a partner, I wanted to become as influential as I could on the strategic leadership of the firm. It’s very much a dream come true.”
Scott, a property litigator by training, became a partner at what was then Cripps Harries Hall in 2002, and subsequently expanded his remit in 2015 when he became head of real estate. He retained that position in 2018 when Kent-based Cripps and Kensington-based Pemberton Greenish combined, in a move that he describes as “really positive”.
Three years and a global pandemic later and that positivity is still evident – even when asked whether it is a challenge taking on the role at this particular time: “In some respects it’s the perfect time to be taking on this kind of position because, although we’ve been phenomenally busy helping clients through these difficult times, we’ve also had a chance to take stock of where we are… and to work out what more we want to do going forward, beyond just providing legal services.”
Scott cites his desire for the firm to become a “more purpose-driven business”, not just focusing on profitability and putting clients “at the heart of everything we do”, but also looking at how the firm can make a positive impact on other areas, such as communities and the environment.
Short-term pain
Invariably, though, the focus for much of the past 12 months has been on helping clients – first by way of crisis management in the immediate fallout from the pandemic, and later by helping them to develop strategies “that allowed their businesses to continue”, Scott says.
Advisory work has increased given the fast pace of legislative change in the early part of the pandemic, particularly in the field of landlord and tenant. What was notable here, Scott says, was the “collaborative approach” between landlords and tenants, with concessionary arrangements, deeds of variation and turnover rents all featuring.
The “excellent” Code of Practice for the commercial property sector – launched in June 2020 as a framework for facilitating discussion between parties – simply reflected “what responsible landlords were doing anyway”, he adds.
That said, Scott acknowledges that there was, and still is, “a bit of game playing going on by some tenants, who are not only using a slightly soft insolvency regime that we have in this country to cherry-pick the stores that they had already possibly decided to do away with way before lockdown, but using those circumstances to get what they want”.
The effect is that Scott and his team have had to try to identify “which tenants truly did need help and those that were playing the game”. It is an area where he believes their help has been “most valued”. He adds: “Those who really did need help never worried about being open about their management accounts and how things were working, so their landlords were quite happy to provide them with assistance going forward.”
Long-term gain
Occasional game playing aside, the way in which landlords and tenants have collaborated over this period will, Scott believes, have a positive long-term effect on the relationship and create greater parity. “It was already happening,” he says, in that tenants “had become customers more than tenants” and landlords “were absolutely appreciative of the fact that it wasn’t enough to just simply say, ‘Here is the lease, pay me the rent and I’m off for the next five years.’”
Scott believes that support needs to be there not simply in relation to the units rented by the tenant – whether located on a high street or in a shopping centre – but also to provide an environment which is conducive to generating footfall or creating an attractive office space.
He also sees flexibility playing a big part in leasing moving forward and references the government’s “well-hidden” announcement in December that it intends to review the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954. Although further detail is awaited, Scott suggests that if it were to be amended to extend the length of lease that is automatically excluded (unless the parties choose to bring it inside the Act), “that would introduce a more streamlined process of leasing for shorter-term leases”.
If that were to happen, he believes the next step would be for those changes to be reflected in a model lease that is accepted industry-wide, making the short-term leasing process quicker and “more akin to almost buying utility services”.
He has already noticed a move away from 10-page leases in favour of two- or three-page documents for short-term leases “that everybody can understand” and are “much more routine”. Eventually, he feels that this kind of product will “become commonplace, even if it’s not already”.
Moving with the times
Flexibility isn’t the only trend on Scott’s radar. We discuss proptech and the way in which lockdown has accelerated the pace of technological change in the sector, which he believes has “concertinaed three or four years’ worth of progress into one year”.
He highlights virtual videoconferencing and document automation as examples, but also digital signatures, which the Land Registry started accepting – subject to certain conditions set out in its Practice guide 8: execution of deeds – in July last year.
“The Land Registry accepting DocuSign has been a big breakthrough,” he adds. “When that skittle went down, you suddenly had an unfettered route through to proper digital signature.” That’s something Scott’s client base has been willing to accept, following his team’s reassurances that it works. And not only does it work, he says, but it has made life “an awful lot easier”.
But other areas of technological efficiency are still a work in progress. Scott sees huge potential for the firm to adopt an interactive transaction management portal, which would see clients – agents, for example – uploading the heads of terms on to the system and initiating the leasing process. That detail would feed into the document production software to produce the first draft and trigger the transaction management workflow. Each step in the process would be mapped out and managed live through the system, with the client being able to message the lawyer or transaction manager direct.
The inputting of the terms should be relatively straightforward for clients and would deliver great efficiency, Scott believes, reducing a “48-hour or two- or three-day process to a matter of hours”. Where the system needs development, though, is in relation to the progression of the transaction, which currently requires clients to log on and check the status, rather than the system proactively automating alerts for clients, which they could access via a mobile phone. That, Scott adds, is “an important feature in a fast-moving and agile world”.
Scott anticipates that these issues can be resolved, with the perfect holistic transaction management product being only a year away from going live. But as a huge proponent of tech, he says even that feels too far: “The impatient element of me would want that to happen within six months. The realistic side of me will say it might be more like 12.”
He believes that taking the lead on creating greater procedural efficiency for clients is something that lawyers are ideally placed to do, because they understand process and project management. “I would be surprised if a client turned around and said, ‘Oh, no, I don’t really want you to help me through that process,’” says Scott.
Which is fortunate really, because taking the lead – in particular, strategically – is exactly what he’ll be doing over the coming years.
