Symposium 2019: Wonderful Lives

July 17, 2019

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s that time of year again…

The gunnercooke Symposium is returning to Oxford on 11-12 September 2019 – and preparations are well under way to make it our greatest event yet! We’re inviting all our partners to join us for two action-packed days brimming with keynote speakers, workshops and insightful discussions to celebrate our 9th birthday.

The theme for this year’s event is ‘Wonderful Lives’, exploring our mission to support the health, wellbeing and lifestyle of every person working within the gunnercooke family. 

When you join gunnercooke you make a brave decision to back yourself. You leave behind being told what to do, when to be in the office at the beginning of the day, when to leave at the end of the day, how many holidays to take, how many hours of work to do each year, when to retire. You leave behind being told to attend meetings and even the amount of the firm’s business development or pro bono work to undertake and you leave behind having your remuneration being determined by others, by committees.  By leaving you have chosen to design your own life. We have one life. We don’t know the meaning of life but the purpose of life is to be happy. You no longer have to do things the way you did before. And we want you to make the most of your new found time and freedom. We want to help you to look at things differently as you design the life that you want. We want you and your family to enjoy your new life – every day. And that is what this years’ celebration is all about.

The snowball effect

Each year we have the pleasure of welcoming more and more lawyers and operating partners to share in the Symposium festivities. A bigger headcount is not only a sign of our growth as a business, it’s a testament to the culture we’ve been cultivating over the past decade.

So many senior lawyers, and now management consultants, we speak to, have become disillusioned with the confines of traditional firms. It’s no surprise really; the archaic structure of the legal industry in particular, is simply not fit for purpose in today’s modern age. But as yet they see no burning platform as they continue to focus on profits per partner and work their young lawyers harder and harder to achieve those profits, unless you believe that morality  and integrity and quality of a person’s life is a burning platform, and unless you believe that they don’t care enough about their people – about the whole person-  and they care even less about their families.

As we grow our professional services firm, we recognise that yes, we want to go from ‘ good to great’ ( the theme of last year’s symposium) – good isn’t good enough for gunnercooke and the drive to be greatwill be relentless – but most of all, the very most of all,  we want to nurture wonderful lives and families.  

We aim to nudge and to help create wonderful lives for every gunnercooke person.

Watch this space!

We’ll be keeping you posted with more Symposium updates over the coming weeks. Oh, and if you haven’t already, make sure to have a quick peek at our highlight reel from last year’s event below…