Leeds’ legal market is so strong, some even believe it has become overcrowded. What makes the city so attractive to law firms?

Gordon Brown described Leeds in 2006 as one of Britain’s ‘important financial clusters’, and it is considered to be one of the country’s regional economic success stories. According to the government’s State of the English Cities report in the same year, along with Manchester, Leeds saw better than average growth over the 1990s and 2000s. And, unlike its ancient Lancastrian foe, Leeds made it into the report’s top 50 cities in Europe ranked by GDP (one of only five UK cities to do so).

The white rose has been blooming indeed, and the city’s legal market has grown with it. With just over 2,500 lawyers and 244 law firms in and around the city, the sector has grown to the point where it is now very well populated. Originally dominated by a core of six large players, including Addleshaw Goddard and Walker Morris, the sector has also matured. Now, a number of national and regional players, full-service as well as niche, such as Lupton Fawcett, Cobbetts, and Gordons, pack into the city, with new entrants every year. Some lawyers now see the sector as saturated, even overcrowded.

Why the plethora of law firms? The strength of the legal sector is inextricably linked with the steady economic success of the city, and lawyers have been in demand to service the businesses and financiers who have come to be based there. This is partly to do with geography and transport, as Richard Marshall, a director and managing partner-in-waiting at Lupton Fawcett, explains: ‘Leeds is right in the middle of England. It has a very good rail and road infrastructure to London, to Scotland, to many places, and has attracted clusters of sectors, from food and drink through to textiles, software, chemicals, and specialist engineers.’

Peter Smart is chairman of Walker Morris, one of the original circle of six, which has just recruited two new teams to its league of lawyers. He says the compactness of the city is also an attraction: ‘Although Leeds attracts a lot of big-ticket work, the size of the city is relatively small, which makes networking part of day-to-day life.’

It is also about commercial clout. A good illustration of this is Leeds Legal, a marketing initiative for the legal sector there. Set up in 2006, the campaign raises awareness of the sector and the services firms offer in Leeds to a national and international audience. They do this with a variety of events, from trade fairs and conferences to sponsored arts events – recently, Opera North – aimed at potential clients and contacts.

The initiative works as a collective. ‘The idea is simple – we are increasing the size of the cake so that everyone gets a bigger slice. We represent all the firms, the whole sector, it’s not a membership thing,’ says Deborah Green, director and founder of Leeds Legal. Instead of firms doing their own marketing, competing against each other for work, they are now selling Leeds as a brand together. ‘We do not give specific recommendations – we speak for the whole sector.’ But, she explains, once a client has decided to come to Leeds, ‘free competition reigns’, and the firms can vie for work just as they would with any other potential client.

And those clients could come from anywhere. In the two years since it started, the campaign has organised and hosted a number of international events, visiting such diverse places as Hong Kong, Chicago and Milan, and has just returned from a trip to Madrid.

There’s something very much of the essence of the city about Leeds Legal. It is a savvy, commercially driven campaign – and it appears to be working, bringing in business even in the short time it has been operating. Marshall, whose firm sponsors Leeds Legal, says Lupton Fawcett has had ‘direct instructions’ from the Milan trip. Green says that ‘people abroad who have never heard of Leeds now know we are here. We are making real business partnerships, for the long term’.

‘We are keen on reciprocity,’ she says. ‘We understand how international trade works. We go to a place, we have a return mission, we have a programme which forges links and builds relationships.’

Leeds Legal also sells the sector on cost. As Marshall says, the message they are sending out is: ‘If you are going to do business in the north of England, do it in Leeds. If you are going to do business in the UK and cost is an issue, come to Leeds.’ Many firms cite the attractive rates they can offer clients. Martyn Fish, a solicitor at HGF Law, a firm of IP specialists which arrived in the city in 2002, says they can be cost-effective because their lawyers can easily get to London. This is where the patent courts are and specialist barristers congregate, but HGF lawyers can get there and still be based in Leeds – and they can pass on the cost benefits to clients. ‘We have quality and we are competitively priced. Our work is not local. We have multinational claims and clients,’ says Fish. In a major piece of IP litigation last year, the firm was pitted against Ashurst. HGF Law won the case, yet the firm says it was half the price of Ashurst.

Rosemary Edwards, head of residential development at longstanding Leeds law firm Shulmans, agrees that competitive rates are an integral part of being a Leeds firm: ‘We offer value for money and no-nonsense advice.’

Straight attitude

Edwards touches on another key component of the Leeds success story – attitude. Lawyers there say they are a straight-talking breed, and they say it in a straight-talking sort of way. Leeds lawyers are, says Edwards, ‘honest and practical, and do what they say they are going to do’.

‘We back up what we say with action. We are very hands-on. We go to a company, we get to know their work. We don’t just wait for email,’ he says. Marshall agrees. He says the Leeds attitude is ‘aggressive and commercial, we don’t sit back and wait – we go and get’.

As the Leeds sector has matured, so has the pool of talented lawyers. Solicitors are attracted to the city because of the variety of the work and the depth of experience that is now available. This in turn adds to Leeds’ ability to sell itself nationally and internationally, as Neil McLean, managing partner for Leeds of global operator DLA Piper, explains: ‘Leeds solicitors can develop skills the firm needs internationally, such as in PFIs or PPPs, and we can export their talent to other areas of the business. A good example is our transport expertise. We’ve sent one of our guys out to California for a new transit opening there. He learned it all here in Leeds.’

Talent appears to come from all around the region. Leeds does, of course, have its own university, but is also well placed to offer work to law students from the College of Law in nearby York, or from the universities in Bradford and Sheffield.

Trainees and newly qualified lawyers may also be attracted to the big names in the city, and the benefits these big guns can provide – DLA Piper, for instance, can send its lawyers on secondments all over the world, from Tbilisi to Dubai. ‘Our lawyers are becoming international citizens,’ says McLean, ‘which is a wonderful place for a young lawyer to be.’

Certainly the city has an international and progressive outlook – a good example of which is new venture the International Centre for Legal Compliance. This is a joint operation between Leeds firm Burton Burton & Ho and academics and professionals with expertise in carbon law. Burton Burton & Ho has already demonstrated its entrepreneurial spirit with a dedicated China-focused PRC department, looking after UK corporate clients who are interested in doing business in China. The ICLC is a research centre involved in the regulatory aspects of carbon trading, emissions, the challenge of carbon capture and storage; very ‘now’, and very global.

There is, however, a downside to this competitive arena. Marshall at Lupton Fawcett goes as far as to call the market ‘aggressive’, and says the challenge for law firms in Leeds is working out ‘how to distinguish yourself as a firm with a relatively easily commoditised product such as legal services’.

Sharp strategy is everything. Lupton Fawcett has taken a two-tier approach: looking after the companies and looking after their proprietors. They have owner-managed and quoted companies on their books, but also are aiming to provide niche services in IP or employment on larger-scale transactions: ‘The big companies, with pressure on legal spend, are making intelligent decisions about getting services from different people,’ says Marshall. McLean at DLA Piper says firms have to take things to the client, to differentiate by having ‘first-mover advantage’ and offering clients new product lines.

Another, thornier side to the white rose is the high street and legal aid story. A few legal aid firms are doing well, such as professionally operated Switalski’s, which opened in Leeds last Autumn and now has 20 staff there. But there has been low-level criticism of initiatives such as Leeds Legal for representing the interests of the full-service, commercial firms at the expense of smaller and more niche firms.

But Leeds Legal’s chairman Alan Baker says there is a trickle-down effect and that, if larger firms take on new work, ‘one-man bands’ may pick up the work larger firms leave behind. But he also admits that it is not really within Leeds Legal’s remit to get involved in the legal aid struggle.

Perhaps a bigger issue for everyone is the economic downturn. But even this may be good news for Leeds, as Smart explains: ‘There is a lot of speculation at the moment that, as a result of the current economic climate, many organisations are increasingly looking for greater value for money. Some clients of London’s City firms are going to be attracted to regional legal centres such as Leeds, which can offer City-quality legal advice but at regional prices.’ And even as apartment prices slump in Leeds, the lawyers are optimistic. McLean says: ‘We don’t have the peaks, but neither do we have the troughs. We are well spread-out as an economy and as a firm.’ Jeremy Shulman, chairman of Shulmans, agrees. His practice has been in the city for 25 years, and he says that the firm’s growth has been ‘organic and steady. There’ve been no downward curves’.

Indeed, professional recruitment firm the Sellick Partnership is sufficiently upbeat to be planning to open an office in Leeds at the beginning of 2009. Hannah Kewley, director of legal at Sellick, explains their rationale: ‘We want to be one step ahead of the game. The market may be a little bit quieter now, but we want to be there when it picks up. We are being positive and pro-active, and we want our clients and candidates to be confident in us.’

Leeds looks set to keep its garden in good shape. Green at Leeds Legal sums it up best when she says: ‘What we lack in football, we make up in other ways.’

Polly Botsford is a freelance journalist

Crowd-puller

Until recently, six national players dominated the legal scene in Leeds: Addleshaw Goddard, DLA Piper, Eversheds, Hammonds, Walker Morris and Pinsent Masons. As Leeds developed through the 1990s and early part of this decade, other firms grew from within and new arrivals started pouring in from outside. As a result, Leeds has a healthy crowd of firms including Lupton Fawcett, Irwin Mitchell, Gordons, Shulmans, Clarion Solicitors and Brooke North – some purely Leeds-based, others with a Leeds presence.

There are some very new kids on the block, too: Watson Burton travelled from Newcastle in 2005, followed this month by Ward Hadaway. Another recent arrival is Mills & Reeve in February this year. The firm is consolidating its national presence and has also opened in Manchester for that reason. Although it is Manchester that currently has the highest number of private practice firms after London (according to Law Society statistics), it is Leeds which has the highest number of large corporate firms – ten in all.

The firms serve a range of local, national and international clients (Walker Morris estimates that 70% of its work is outside the region), and cover a rainbow of sectors: financial services being the dominant field, but also property, media and telecoms, biosciences, even nanotechnology.