It’s officially all smiles in Manchester: the city has the highest level of happiness in the country, according to the UK Competitiveness Index 2010. And, in terms of actual competitiveness, it is ranked 13th overall, and the third most competitive ‘large city’. After a difficult couple of years, the city’s 4,000-odd lawyers may just be beginning to smile again.
The Manchester legal scene has lived through challenging times of late and has undergone significant change. However, since the Gazette last reported from the city in early 2009, the situation has not worsened. There have been more redundancies at many of the larger firms and at a few of the smaller ones, such as George Davies at the end of last year. But there have also been new entrants joining the big names, including a new opening for national insurance firm Barlow Lyde & Gilbert, which opened last September and now has 18 fee-earners and four partners. The newest partner to join, Stephen Gorman, moved just last month from his post as managing partner of Davies Arnold Cooper’s (DAC) Manchester office.
The city also has a new boutique firm, Millbank Edge, based in Spinningfields, set up last month by three partners who met while at Beachcroft.
Of course, within firms, the recession has affected practice areas differently, some faring better than others. One area which keeps on growing is sports law. This should come as no surprise for a city often described as the football capital of the world. Sports law is the glamorous end of the profession where, as one solicitor said, you have actually heard of the client before you start working with them because they are household names. One such sports lawyer is Maurice Watkins, joint senior partner at Brabners Chaffe Street, who the Times refers to as ‘a legend in the industry’. With more than 30 years’ experience representing Manchester United as well as being a director of the club, Watkins is responsible for developing Brabners’ sports law team, which is now the largest in the country and boasts over half of the Premier League’s clubs as clients, as well as European and international clubs and even the South Africa Premier League. ‘Football is a global game, after all,’ says Watkins.
Good sportIt’s not all football, however. Manchester will soon be home to the BBC Sports division when the corporation moves parts of its operations from London to Media City UK in Salford Quays next year. Certainly, Brabners and other sports law teams in the area represent clients in a whole range of sports such as rugby, cycling or squash. Watkins’ team acts for a number of the commercial sponsors of the 2012 Olympics. ‘Our aim is to add value for our sportspeople and clubs – to be one step ahead of legal developments, to educate our clients on how to avoid trouble and how to operate within the rules and regulations,’ he says. If Watkins is the grand old-ish man of sports law, JMW’s new sports division is the arriviste. Managing partner Bill Jones is honest about his motivation for choosing sports law: ‘We wanted to choose a service which captures the imagination.’ At the time it was set up, JMW was changing radically, having established itself in new offices in Spinningfields. Enter Ben Haworth, a former professional footballer who played for Leeds, Sheffield United and Bolton, and who has now joined JMW and brings his extensive list of contacts and networks both within football and in other sports such as rugby and athletics, straight to JMW’s door.
Haworth’s key function is in the business development of the firm. He is a convincing ambassador in this respect because he can talk directly to potential clients about his own experiences and empathise with sportspeople at client events.
The development of this practice area is certainly working. Jones concedes that, 18 months ago, the firm ‘had no reputation in sports law whatsoever’. Now, however, it has been appointed global legal adviser to the Soccerex European Forum, a huge annual ‘football-meets-business’ event which was held in Manchester earlier this year and will return to the city for the next four years. JMW also represents Bryan Robson in his capacity as Thailand’s national manager, as well as a number of England under-21 footballers.
Sports lawyers can spend much of their time dealing with European and international issues and, in particular, the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, Switzerland. One of Manchester’s most respected sports lawyers, Mark Hovell, sits at the court as an arbitrator. The court hears disputes between clubs, associations or sportspeople on issues regulated at the supra-national level, and also acts as a court of arbitration where countries may not have their own national, arbitral body. He will be on standby in case there is a dispute in the build-up to the World Cup in South Africa this summer.
Hovell is managing partner and head of sports at George Davies, a medium-sized Manchester firm. He is also an insolvency practitioner, which comes in handy when sports entities such as Portsmouth Football Club go under – Hovell is currently acting for some of its players. The firm has represented the Professional Footballers Association for a number of years, working with players such as Joe Cole, David James and Rio Ferdinand. By extension, Hovell also represents many of the members of the Professional Players Federation, the umbrella body of players’ associations.
Like JMW, George Davies also has an ex-pro on its payroll. Ex-Northern Ireland international Colin Murdock was a professional for 17 years and won 34 caps for his country. He is now ploughing his way through his training contract and is perhaps one of the few lawyers who has had to take a pay cut to join the profession. He also has a prestigious role on the FA’s Football Judicial Panel, the adjudication panel on issues such as onfield discipline, the FA Agents Regulations and doping. Murdock says the panel ‘is really great work and you are privy to what goes on in practice; and this can be a real revelation’.
Insurance influxIf sports law is providing entertaining and steady work for some firms in stormy economic times, insurance and insurance litigation is the silver lining of the recession cloud – myriad insurance claims have followed the fallout of the crash. This is particularly so in respect of professional liability claims, such as claims by lenders against their original advisers on valuations as property deals have fallen out of the sky. This has boosted an already thriving insurance law market in Manchester. Solicitor-advocate Ian McConkey, a partner specialising in professional indemnity at Beachcroft, notes that ‘many of the new arrivals to the legal scene here are focusing on this kind of work’. This is partly due to the fact that there was a real sea change within the existing insurance law firms in the city when James Chapman & Co, which for a long time was the dominant firm doing this kind of work, went through a merger a few years ago which was seen to open the way for new entrants.
Barlow Lyde & Gilbert chose Manchester as its second regional office specifically because of the city’s insurance credentials. Richard Harrison, the firm’s UK regions strategy partner, says: ‘We opened in Manchester because we wanted to extend our offering in London by serving smaller and non-London based potential clients there. ‘Manchester has fast become a well-established insurance centre.’
The list of brokers and underwriters in the city is getting longer. Big names such as Towergate, Aon (who sponsored Manchester United) and Marsh, as well as underwriters including Zurich and Aviva, are all visible in Manchester now. Of course, this leads to more lawyers gaining more experience in insurance law. As Harrison says: ‘There is already a fantastic and well-educated pool of labour with expertise in this field.’
With these practice areas doing well, Manchester’s lawyers are also keeping an open and commercial mind on how best to run their businesses, thus contributing to the competitive edge which gives the city its third place on the UK Competitiveness Index for large cities. JMW’s Jones fully intends to build what he calls his ‘corporate empire’ with the development of JMW Business Services. This will be used as a platform for various initiatives once alternative business structures and external investment are given the green light in October 2011. The firm has already made inroads by acquiring a large claims management company, U Claim, and also has a subsidiary, ML Solutions 4 U, which runs courses on money laundering.
Developing new products is also a priority for many. Davies Arnold Cooper is about to launch a new financial product which, as managing partner and commercial litigator Alex Megaw explains, is aimed at developing investment in agricultural property: ‘This enables farmers to diversify and investors to get better returns for their cash. We are working with one client on this and have already had interest from others.’ National firm Cobbetts, which is headquartered in Manchester, is not so much looking at new products but new horizons with the launch of Cobbetts International. The firm is opening an office in Cairo and developing a client base of foreign companies which are showing an interest in the UK market.
Likewise, Millbank Edge is striving to do things differently. It is offering a slight variation on the way it provides legal services. It currently has three partners but does not retain a high number of fee-earning staff. Instead, the aim is to provide clients with partner-led projects (such as commercial transactions or litigation) and bring in particular specialisms from other law firms on demand, thus keeping costs low and fees competitive.
All these trends are about lawyers as business people creating new ideas and, in particular, getting in new talent such as JMW’s Haworth. Including non-lawyers in the business will happen more when they can also potentially become owners and stakeholders in the firm.
If many lawyers appear upbeat about 2010, they also agree that much depends on what happens today. As Davies Arnold Cooper’s Megaw says: ‘We feel as if business is paused waiting for the starting gun. There is a lot of pent-up demand and clients want to do deals, want to get going, but there is concern about the outcome of the election and the cuts which will inevitably follow.’
The outlook is certainly cheerier than a year ago nevertheless, and this enthusiasm was marked by the first Manchester Legal Awards, held at the Midland Hotel before Easter. Run by the Manchester Law Society in conjunction with the Manchester Evening News, the awards were the brainchild of Fran Eccles-Bech, executive director of Manchester Law Society. The event attracted hundreds of lawyers, and Eccles-Bech commented that it was ‘dedicated to celebrating the fantastic legal talent we have here in Manchester’. For a city which likes to put on a show, it was a fitting way to rejuvenate the legal market.
Though salaries are lower than in London (on average around 80%), Manchester is a great place to be a trainee or newly qualified lawyer. Rents are affordable, even in the city centre, and when the Gazette interviewed a cross-section of young lawyers, many lived within walking distance of work, particularly in the Castlefield area – home of canals, wharfs and Granada TV – or in the trendy Northern Quarter.
There are almost 500 trainees and over 1,500 junior lawyers sweating it out across the city’s various legal practices. The Manchester Trainee Solicitors Group and the Manchester Young Solicitors Group are hugely popular and busy with a host of events, from the social to the useful. Caroline Dean, a lawyer at Hill Dickinson in the insurance fraud department, says the networking opportunities and ability to build friendships and contacts has been invaluable: ‘I trained in a high street criminal practice and then decided to change tack. That meant I had to go out and find a completely new practice area. For me, the network I had built up through the MTSG was a lifeline and provided the leads and the confidence to find a role in another practice area in a very different type of firm.’
Buses and trams are cheap and accessible, though walking is a popular activity in the city generally. Pannone trainee Rebecca French, who was named Manchester’s Trainee of the Year at the city’s first ever Legal Awards, is originally from Kent but intends to make Manchester her new home. ‘Manchester lawyers do plenty of walking, including the Legal Walk,’ she said. French should know – she once made it all the way to Burnley on foot for charity.
Spinningfields is a new development in western Manchester between the River Irwell and Deansgate, and is fast becoming a preferred home for the city’s law firms. It has the feel of a mini Canary Wharf and is just as windy. Though not as monumental, the buildings are tall and imposing, set around attractive landscaped squares and walkways, one of which takes office workers down to the riverside. There are ice rinks in the winter and outdoor cinemas in the summer. Conveniently situated near Manchester’s new Civil Justice Centre (pictured), the development houses the usual gamut of upmarket cafes and restaurants and will soon see luxury brands arriving – though one can still walk to the main shopping area in a matter of minutes.
Shoosmiths, Pinsent Masons and Halliwells already have offices in Spinningfields. They will soon be joined by Beachcroft, which is moving into the area this month. Its brand new office at 3 Hardman Street is on one floor and is completely open plan. If you stand in the middle of the room you can see out both to the east and west of the city, with stunning views of Manchester’s slightly dishevelled cityscape in the foreground and rolling hills beyond. Beachcroft will be joined in its new home by its latest addition, the new healthcare team transferring from Halliwells.
JMW is also in Spinningfields. Managing partner Bill Jones says the location used to be ‘outside the main area’ of business in Manchester but now is rapidly becoming one of the ‘main areas for business’. Jones says this area is responsible for the rebirth of JMW, as it already had the site in Spinningfields and so had to become the kind of firm which befitted the location: ‘We bought our site in the 1980s. We had to decide. We could either move away from the area as we wouldn’t fit in because of the work we were doing, which was essentially crime and family work, or we could stay here and change our profile and the firm’s direction. We chose the latter option. We developed a five-year plan, gave up £1.5m of legal aid crime work and made it a commercial firm.’
Polly Botsford is a freelance journalist
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