Despite the recession Birmingham continues to attract new talent

One-time workshop of the world, today a metropolis renowned for its diversity and commercial nous, Birmingham has grown accustomed to reinventing itself. Since the early 1990s, England’s second city has been in a long regeneration phase. And although the recession has hit it hard, major development projects are keeping Brummies’ chins up and its lawyers busy.

Ever since the enormous – and rather angular – International Convention Centre opened in 1991, Birmingham has been demolishing, replacing, rebuilding and renovating. In that time the city has welcomed a range of new visitors and kept businesses bustling. The ICC has hosted organisations as diverse as the Baptist World Congress and the Conservative Party.

Also part of the city’s ‘convention quarter’ is the National Indoor Arena, which converts from sports stadium to concert hall from week to week. Today, Davis Cup tennis; tomorrow, Beyoncé. And this regeneration has not only been good news for property and construction lawyers – as the city has thrived, so has a varied legal sector.

Over the past decade, Birmingham’s legal market has attracted a large number of new entrants including Shoosmiths, Bevan Brittan, Mills & Reeve and Freeth Cartwright. These arrivistes now compete with the long-established firms such as Wragge & Co (established 1834) and Martineau (1828), Eversheds and Pinsent Masons. One such newcomer, Mills & Reeve, originally an East Anglian firm, arrived in Birmingham in 1998 following the demands of a then-client, the NHS Litigation Authority. But from these single-sector beginnings, the firm has moved on – and it now boasts 120 lawyers in its Colmore Row office ‘and is still growing’, according to national managing partner Guy Hinchley.

If Mills & Reeve’s growth is impressive, Shoosmiths’ growth is frightening: the national firm only opened its Birmingham office at the beginning of 2003 and now has around 150 people down the road from Mills & Reeve. But Joel Kordan, head of Shoosmiths’ Birmingham office, says this success is not measured by the number of people – it’s about the quality. ‘The firm has brought people in who are fairly disgruntled somewhere else and [we] have also taken away the glass from other ceilings,’ he says.

He describes his office as made up of ‘refugees from the bigger practices’. And he is clearly not averse to the odd bit of fishing for talent: ‘I don’t see people as being untouchable.’

Both Mills & Reeve and Shoosmiths believe their growth also has a lot to do with focusing on core expertise or sectors, as Hinchley explains: ‘There are lots of great law firms in Birmingham so you need to have a strategy to compete. We focused on the NHS and real estate, where we knew we could do well, and grew from there.’

Kordan agrees, but says it is also about being ‘quite loudmouth’ and ‘having a passion to grow’. He adds: ‘Our business plan was to be famous for something in five years.’ Shoosmiths chose property and, having recently secured a huge social housing department in its entirety from Cobbetts (31 people in total), that aspiration has clearly been fulfilled.

Kordan says that a new entrant like Shoosmiths keeps the whole legal market in Birmingham on its toes – and that is a good thing for everyone. ‘Existing firms have responded to the challenge of new entrants by raising their own game,’ he says.

Keeping controlSo how about those existing Birmingham bigwigs? Historically, six large firms dominated the market (known as ‘the Birmingham six’). They were: Wragge & Co, Martineau (until a recent rebrand, Martineau Johnson), Pinsent Masons (originally just Pinsents), Eversheds, Edge Ellison (which merged with Hammonds) and Needham & James (which merged with DLA Piper).

Only Wragge & Co and Martineau are still in their original guise. More importantly, these are the only two firms that are still run from Birmingham.

Martineau was recently awarded Birmingham Law Society’s law firm of the year gong, while last November Insider magazine named it property law firm of the year. Bill Barker, Martineau’s managing partner, says his firm prefers the Birmingham-led model. Naming no names, he adds: ‘Other firms which have become national or even international don’t have the same ability to influence their own offices [in the city] anymore. They have lost control and perhaps also their course. Our firm’s traditions and roots are in Birmingham. We launched an office in London to open doors and that’s enough for us.’

Like Mills & Reeve and Shoosmiths, Martineau has taken a ‘sector strategy’ approach – focusing on areas of expertise where the firm has particular strength. For Martineau that is education, in which it is the region’s leader (according to Legal 500). Barker says that ‘a centre of excellence’ is what clients are demanding. ‘Clients want specific legal expertise in one place,’ he stresses.

Martineau has developed an interest in climate change and the impact it has – and will have – on clients. The firm is a founder member of the Legal Sector Alliance, the profession’s response to the challenges of climate change. Andrew Whitehead, head of the firm’s energy and utilities team, has led Martineau in this direction and now blogs for the Birmingham Post on climate change issues.

The establishment of specialist areas such as these may or may not be part and parcel of a firm which has greater local control over its direction. But Martineau and Wragge & Co do stand apart from other firms in having kept their independence and maintained a strong and central presence in Birmingham without apparently limiting their scope. Like Martineau, Wragge & Co has an office in London and is present in Brussels, Munich and even Guangzhou in China.

In contrast, those of the original Birmingham six which are now part of a national and/or international scene, such as Pinsent Masons or Eversheds, are no longer run from Birmingham. For Pinsent Masons, it was the merger with Masons which changed its structure. From its office at the centre of Colmore Circus, with a commanding view out of the city beyond an ex-BT tower (now apartments) into the surrounding region, the firm (Pinsents as was) grew steadily. In 2004 it underwent an overhaul that saw it restructured on a group-practice basis rather than by location.

Eversheds’ story is even more dramatic. Sue Lewis, senior office partner at the Birmingham office, explains: ‘The Eversheds story, which started here over 100 years ago, is one of continuing change – like Madonna, we are always transforming ourselves. When I joined in 1980, it was a smallish single-site firm.’ Now it is an international agglomeration with 5,000 lawyers worldwide.

Whether old or new, reformed or revamped, some firms are indubitably suffering during this recession. Although almost all the firms the Gazette spoke to were upbeat about their current status (only Martineau’s Barker conceded that his firm had ‘contracted a bit’), it is also true that some have made redundancies – though not as many as London-based firms.

Hinchley says that Mills & Reeve has been partially protected from the worst of the recession because it has ‘good hedging’, as he describes it, namely a broad spectrum of work types: private client, private companies and the public sector. He is, however, pessimistic about the immediate future. He says: ‘The recession hasn’t hit the public sector yet, but the predictions are that it will as we move into 2011. This may or may not affect legal services there. But we have to be aware of the fact.’

Lewis is a little more upbeat: ‘Projects are still on hold. But if you look around, business has stopped falling, so maybe we are bumping along the bottom.’

Some argue that those firms which have relied until now on obtaining work which the larger national and international firms have left behind as they broadened their own horizons are likely to feel the recession the most. Greg Lowson, head of Pinsent Masons’ Birmingham office, observes: ‘During the boom, smaller firms could pick up the work that the larger firms didn’t need. But this work is from clients that are small, private companies. They don’t have a large legal spend – they never did – but in the boom time it didn’t matter. Now in a recession it does, and they are just not spending money on lawyers at the moment.’

Firms have responded to the challenges of the recession in myriad ways: Mills & Reeve has avoided redundancies in the city by introducing sabbaticals, internal moves and part-time working. Pinsent Masons has sent some of its fee-earners on client secondments – which helps with client retention, keeps costs down and gives the fee-earner something to write home about.

London callingRecessions do, of course, increase competition as the size of the pie diminishes. But many firms believe they are now in the running for business which would perhaps traditionally have been kept in London. And Birmingham’s lawyers agree that they can be distinguished from other large regional cities by their proximity to London, as Alex Bishop, commercial litigation partner at Shoosmiths in Birmingham, explains: ‘Our proximity to London is a unique opportunity for [the city]. If in-house lawyers are being squeezed and they are looking for the same standards but not at the same cost, we can offer them that.’

Lowson agrees: ‘The flight of work from London to the regions hasn’t really happened as much as everyone said it would in the last five or six years, because there haven’t been the budget pressures on general counsel. But maybe this is the time.’

The travelling time between Birmingham and London is critical to this argument because it gives Birmingham the edge over its regional rivals, such as Manchester, which has also styled itself England’s ‘second city’. Now we get into discussions not about hours but about minutes. ‘Birmingham’s train connection to London is now one hour and 12 minutes,’ says Bishop. When the Gazette checked the schedules, National Rail was quoting train times as one hour 22 minutes, but that’s still pretty fast compared with London to Manchester, which takes just over two hours (usually two hours nine minutes). Added to this is the fact that New Street station, the main station in Birmingham (also being regenerated and revamped), is only a short walk from many of the main law firms’ offices. This means busy fee-earners can dash to a meeting in London using these trains. Barker has timed it. ‘It’s seven minutes from my desk to the platform,’ he says.

Although a few Manchester firms are based near that city’s main station, Manchester Piccadilly, the reality is that a Birmingham lawyer can be at a meeting in London in under two hours, door to door. No Manchester-based lawyer can possibly do that.

Certainly, firms in Birmingham agree that the city attracts great candidates for fee-earning roles – Kordan says he has had 1,000 applications since he opened in Birmingham and many of them were of a high standard.

Attracting talentHinchley agrees: ‘Birmingham does attract bright graduates – it is a great place to train and there are offerings in private practice and in-house.’

Those looking for a public sector career can look to join Birmingham City Council, which has the largest legal team in the country (see [2008] Gazette, 24 April, 20). Birmingham also has a number of interesting and unique practices which specialise in particular areas: Public Interest Lawyers, which has represented CND, as well as Iraqi civilians killed or injured during the Iraq War, is run by Phil Shiner, who was interviewed in last week’s Gazette (see [2009] Gazette, 4 June, 14). TRP Solicitors (also known as The Rights Partnership) focuses specifically on immigration work, particularly when it is linked with human rights and asylum issues. Of course, recruitment at the moment is unsettled, but some firms are reporting hires – Hinchley says Mills & Reeve is taking on six out of seven of its trainees as newly qualified solicitors.

It says something about the confidence of a city that it is constantly ‘upgrading’ and is prepared to build not only business headquarters, shopping plazas and concert arenas, but also other less obviously profitable amenities. In its Eastside project (pictured), the council is funding a huge regeneration scheme which includes an eight-acre park – the new green space will be the first park to be built in Birmingham since Victorian times, and will double the total open acreage of the city centre.

The motivation behind Eastside City Park is not only aesthetic. It is also there to attract the business community and create a congenial and interesting space for professionals such as lawyers to work in. Other authorities around the UK are similarly earmarking land for parks and green spaces (such as the Thames Gateway development), but Birmingham’s Eastside City Park is one of the largest and most ambitious.

It is no surprise then that Barker observes changes in the city: ‘There was a time when people came into Birmingham and then just went straight out again. Now they are staying a bit longer. The city has always attracted lawyers and law firms – and never more so than in recent times. With these continued regeneration plans, perhaps many more of us will be staying that bit longer too.’