While Birmingham has a massive legal market, its eastern siblings boast quality bar work, reports Jon Robins

’Location is not important to us,’ says Tony Hill, senior clerk at Nottingham’s leading civil set, Ropewalk Chambers. ‘We have people in Truro and all the way up to Carlisle. We receive work from all over the country, and traditionally a lot of our work in personal injury comes from Leeds and Sheffield, where the heavy industry was. Geography does not have much of a bearing on us.’


Nonetheless, Nottingham has a small but vibrant bar comprising three distinct specialist sets – Ropewalk (civil), St Mary’s Chambers (the only specialist family set outside London), and 1 High Pavement (crime) – plus the generalist practice KCH Barristers. There are a further three main chambers in Leicester.


‘We have been growing steadily over the years because Nottingham is a very busy area for the bar,’ reckons Peter Joyce QC, leader of the midlands circuit. His chambers, 1 High Pavement, broke away from Ropewalk in 1990. ‘Some would say that we were ahead of the game in identifying that you need to have separate criminal practitioners from civil practitioners. Either you go for the superset or the specialist set, and we opted for the latter.’


It is a marked difference in approach from what has been happening in the Birmingham market, which has seen the advent of Number 5 Chambers (formerly known as 5 Fountain Court) as a superset with some 160 tenants. Mr Joyce reckons that the entire east midlands bar comprises in the region of 200 barristers, with 140 of them in Nottingham. There are 43 tenants at 1 High Pavement.


‘You wouldn’t necessarily say that Nottingham is known for high-flown chancery work, but for all normal requirements, the bar serves the local area very well,’ he adds. St Mary’s Chambers has 21 members and offers a region-wide service, with its barristers appearing in courts in ‘Derbyshire, Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, Warwickshire, Northamptonshire, Yorkshire and beyond’.


In Leicester, the three main sets comprise the two common law generalist practices, 2 New Street and New Walk Chambers, plus the mainly criminal practice De Montfort Chambers. ‘Leicester is quite a busy legal world and 40 years ago it was the biggest bar in the provinces outside of London,’ claims Paul Burtenshaw, the senior clerk at 2 New Street, which has 22 tenants. He points out that, unlike Ropewalk, the workload of his barristers is largely local. ‘We mostly work from Leicester, Derby and Coventry, and maybe a bit in Peterborough,’ he adds.


Have they been tempted to follow the superset approach of their Birmingham neighbours? ‘We never really wanted to go super-big like many of the largest sets in Birmingham have gone,’ says Mr Burtenshaw. ‘We value the more personal approach, which means solicitors can speak to a clerk and not to an automated voice.’


Is there rivalry between the Birmingham bar and its neighbour? Not really, Mr Hill says. ‘We are quite often against each other in the courts and they are our competitors, but we’re not in any kind of turf war with them. If they opened up an annex in Nottingham, then that might change things.’


Mr Burtenshaw says: ‘There are lots of London counsel coming up to do Leicester work, but I think the Birmingham barristers stick to Birmingham, which is a big city with a big legal centre. They do not feel the need to come to Leicester, but it is a busy city for lawyers and we have a fairly big bar to cope with that.’