Andy Law open "The law firm"

Andy Law, a founding member of St.Luke's, structured his new agency again. Formerly known as Law/Kenneth the agency goes now by the name of "the law firm".

Check out at: the-l-a-w-firm.com

Previously, when it was named Law/Kenneth in The Guardian: Laying down the law

So at long last I have established the creative company I have been espousing for over five years. You may wonder why, exactly, it took so long. I guess the reason is blindingly obvious. Only now, after a wretched three years of almost Shakespearean tragic/comic actions, do I have the right tools for the job and the right teams for the task.

The idea behind Law & Kenneth is very simple. Since the end of the 1980s I have been watching three things happen, in concert, to our business; first, the gentle decline of main media advertising as the principal means of communication; secondly, the growing ability, through necessity, of businesses around the world to truly innovate; and thirdly, the gradual congealing of our business into huge conglomerates, so that brilliant innovators like Messrs Howell, Henry, Chaldecott and Lury slide peacefully into WPP.

 

Don't misread what I'm saying here. I have no issue with the personalities within the conglomerates. Watching Martin Sorrell put WPP firmly in the centre of global business at Davos was genuinely impressive and David Bell at IPG is a great guy and passionate innovator. It's just that my personal instinct is that our business globally lags behind our clients in terms of systems innovation, new product development and customer choice.

And anyone who has heard me banging the tables at conferences around the world will know that this is not a recent issue of mine. I built St Luke's to innovate the UK scene in the 90s; I failed with boymeetsgirl to do the same within the existing network system. Perhaps another route was needed.

Law & Kenneth is the product of the classic blank-piece-of-paper exercise; if global creative companies did not exist what they would they look like if they started for the first time today. I and my colleague Praveen Kenneth - and a formidable body of "wise men" - answered our own questions.

We felt that global companies would have an east-meets-west feel, rather than an overtly European or US slant.

We felt that inspiration and learning would come from modern linked networks such as Linux, fast global delivery systems like Google and eBay and value-based organisations like the Body Shop International or even the Montessori school system.

We felt they would have innovation hard-wired into the operational systems, like Apple.

We wanted our company to have the ability to source creativity from the global gene pool, like the music business has for so many years.

Finally we applied a mantra I have been applying to my clients for many years. In business, you either add value or cost.

How could we add value and lower cost?

We would not duplicate services, wherever possible.

We would create an economic imperative for the network to feed off itself, rather than lose revenue to outside suppliers.

We would speed up our delivery response rate to clients so that they could get to market as fast as possible.

And we would offer our clients the creativity they needed to get to the job done, not just the creativity the office happened to have within its walls.

These led to the principles of the Global Nodal Network and Open Source Creativity (see lawkenneth.com for more on these).

In three months we sorted through 25 countries on a candidate list. We agreed six shareholder agreements in six diverse markets, built the website and produced the brochure. Simultaneously, we have been pitching for a global client of huge repute.

I say this not to boast (although I am immensely proud of what we have created), but to make the point that Law & Kenneth must also get to market fast and innovate. We have planned for up to 30 "nodes" (small entrepreneurial teams of up to 45 people) around the world by end of 2006.

I was asked by the Guardian for more detail on why I had not got to this quicker and why my previous entities were unable to deliver it. It's a good question, I guess. One minute I was running the agency of the year, winning the millennium business ethics award and winning one of Ernst & Young's entrepreneur of the year awards. The next I was watching everything I believed in - good people and sustainable business - going down the toilet.

The truth is that intellectually I arrived at this point some years ago (read Experiment at Work). But I should have remembered what Jay Chiat used to say to me: "You can't make people do what they don't want to do".

The teams around the world DO want to do this because they dread the prolonged status of small independent and fear life in the conglomerate.

Law & Kenneth ties these independent, creative, entrepreneurs together and harnesses them to a value system based on modern networking and innovation.

And the best thing of all about this model is that there are plenty more where they came from!