HARPER Macleod chief executive Martin Darroch is a little bit different to most law firm managers.

For one thing, he’s not a lawyer - an accountant by profession, Mr Darroch joined Harper Macleod as finance director before taking on his current role 10 years ago.

For another, he doesn’t - or at least didn’t - like law firms very much.

“When I joined [Harper Macleod predecessor firm] Ross Harper Murphy they asked if there was anything they should know about me and I said ‘yes, I hate law firms’,” Mr Darroch said.

He added that he “thought they were the worst-run businesses I’d ever seen”.

The reason, which has been much debated in the legal sector over the years, is that while lawyers have the ability to look at issues from all angles and generally make very good advisers, that particular skillset does not always transfer well to management.

The other issue is that, as partnerships, most firms are still run on consensus, which can be crippling when it comes to making decisions.

It is no surprise, then, that Mr Darroch has made a virtue of running a tight ship during his decade at the helm of Harper Macleod, overseeing a period in which the firm’s turnover has grown from £4 million to £26m and its office network has expanded to include Edinburgh, Inverness, Shetland and Thurso as well as its native Glasgow.

The discipline has paid off, with Mr Darroch’s decision to run the firm more as a business than a partnership, not to mention his hard line on costs, ensuring the firm’s bottom line has continued to rise too.

Although there were a couple of years between 2011/12 and 2015/16 when the firm’s turnover stagnated at £21m, over the five-year period the firm’s top line increased by 37 per cent, from £19m to £26m, while its pre-tax profit figure rose by 50 per cent, from £6.2m to £9.3m.

But it is not just in having an accountant’s eye for financial management that Mr Darroch seeks to differentiate his firm.

Indeed, rather than modelling the business on others in the same sector, it is brands operating in the retail industry, which are aeons ahead of law firms when it comes to tailoring customer experiences, that Mr Darroch seeks to emulate.

“When you’re a full-service firm like ours retail is a good reference point,” he said.

“If you look at someone like John Lewis, it is a well-branded retailer that has embraced fully having locations but also having online shopping - they didn’t see it as having to be one or the other.

“For me it’s about how we can get the level of value that someone like Tesco can get from customers - do we have a Tesco Clubcard understanding of our clients’ habits and needs?

“How do we get that? By not being a law firm.

“When I’m looking for innovation and how to improve the business I never, ever look to what other law firms are doing.”

In keeping with the retailing theme, more often than not Mr Darroch refers to the people who buy the firm’s services as customers as opposed to clients and he even goes so far as to describe the business as a “knowledge and data management company” as opposed to a law firm.

As is the case with other data businesses, Mr Darroch believes Harper Macleod’s success will ultimately be measured by the way it uses data and applies knowledge to “align the business to our customers’ needs” and that that process itself could completely alter the way the firm operates in the future.

“I don’t know what we’ll look like in five years but we do have to keep pace with the customer journey,” he said.

“There’s always going to be a need for access to justice locally, but eventually there will be some stand-out brands that people will just go to for certain services.

“It’s a bit like a Rubik’s Cube - we’re just one law firm but we’re full service so what colour do we need to show customers [for the service they are looking for].”

Although Mr Darroch would credit his non-legal background with forming his philosophy on how best to run a law firm, he does not believe that non-lawyers make the best managers per se.

“There are some excellent leaders at law firms who are lawyers but they’ve made sure they are surrounded by very good professional executive teams,” he said.

“It’s that recognition that you need a fit for purpose board and that that board shouldn’t necessarily be full of lawyers.”