In the latest in our series of regional profiles, Jon Robins looks at how booming Cardiff is the hub of the legal market in Wales.


The Welsh renaissance has been in full force since the 1998 establishment of the Welsh Assembly. Landmark developments such as the Millennium Stadium and Cardiff Bay have buoyed the local economy, and last month’s ‘Jones, Jones, Jones’ event suggests that the rekindled self-belief shows little sign of running out of steam.



With a similarly rejuvenated Welsh legal market, no doubt ‘Jones the Solicitor’ was well represented among the 1,244 others beating the world record for the largest gathering of people with the same name.



‘Cardiff is a thriving city,’ enthuses Gareth Williams, senior partner at Hugh James (another Jones, Michael, a renowned and feared litigator, started the firm in 1960). ‘The fact that the Welsh Assembly has come into existence has created more of a national identity for the country. It has given the city a bit of a buzz and the legal centre is prospering.’



Cardiff is the political and economic centre of Wales and, consequently, its legal powerhouse. Despite the city’s undoubted resurgence, it is the four big players that still dominate the local market. Each has a unique identity and a markedly different strategy. National player Eversheds has the biggest presence, with a massive 732 staff. However, its practice tends towards volume work.



The largest indigenous practice, Hugh James, has 47 partners and 600 staff (including 28 Welsh-speaking fee-earners) mainly in Cardiff, and with smaller branches in Merthyr Tydfil and Blackwood. Then there is Morgan Cole, which after a few tempestuous years is back on track and pursuing its ‘M4 corridor’ practice with more than 350 employees in six locations in south Wales, the Thames Valley, and London. The fourth major player is Geldards, with has about 240 of its 570 staff in the city, with the rest in the east midlands between Nottingham and Derby.



‘Cardiff is rather like a building site at the moment,’ comments Eversheds’ Cardiff managing partner Alan Meredith approvingly. ‘We’ve had to regenerate following the downturn in steel and coal over the last 25 years. We’ve had to slowly transform the economy.’ The firm’s Welsh operation was subsumed into ‘the Eversheds federation’ in 1989; prior to that it was Philips & Buck, which dated back to the beginning of the 20th century.



The firm treats its Welsh operation as part of its central region, including Birmingham and Nottingham. The three offices account for £115 million in income, just under a third of the firm’s total turnover of £350 million. ‘We see the region as the engine to drive the growth in London,’ explains Mr Meredith. ‘Cardiff is important, not least because of the devolved government. It may not be to the extent of Scotland, but with the Government of Wales Act there are devolved law-making powers in the field of education and health, which has an implication for anybody doing or intending to do business in Wales.’ The firm handles a lot of work for the Welsh Development Agency and, for example, acted for the government on the funding of the Wales Millennium Centre.



Government business is central to the local legal market. Morgan Cole is the biggest public sector firm in Cardiff. Commercial director Tim Pashley reckons the firm provides more than one-third of public sector legal advice in the principality, according to research conducted by the National Assembly last year. But he worries that Cardiff’s commercial world often overlooks homegrown talent for the security of London firms.



‘The survey was predictable, but one thing that it emphasised was that the bigger businesses with interests in Wales and, indeed some public sector institutions, still looked to City firms to do some of what they would regard as their more sophisticated work.’

Morgan Cole is the assembly’s main legal adviser – a job that goes out to tender every three years – and represented it in the construction of its home, as well as the development of Cardiff Bay, including the construction of an aquarium.



Eversheds has been going into recruitment overdrive of late. Mr Meredith says: ‘We have recruited 220 people, including 123 legal advisers, this year. We operate a legal assistance group which provides commodity services to the finance industry, and so it’s acting for various banks and financial institutions.’ Their advisers work on various volume businesses, offering advice on mortgages, property services, secured and unsecured lending, finance litigation and insurance claims for ‘defendants, large stores and insurance groups’.



Lower rents and cheaper salary costs make Cardiff an attractive option for commoditised legal services. ‘If one looks at overhead costs, then the rental would be £5 [per square foot] cheaper than Bristol or Birmingham,’ Mr Meredith notes.



Further east, Swansea is the second biggest legal centre in Wales. ‘A nice place to live, and that’s the reason why some call it the graveyard of ambition,’ quips one Cardiff-based solicitor. ‘I say that as a Swansea boy,’ he adds.



That said, there was plenty of excitement in the local market four years ago so far as the region’s leading firm Morgan Cole was concerned. After the firm had some problems coping with rapid expansion, a group of its Swansea lawyers left to form their own practice in the town, Morgan LaRoche. However, Morgan Cole has retrenched, says one partner at a Cardiff firm. ‘The fact that they have is good for Swansea. It demonstrates that it can support major – in provincial terms – firms. That’s great news for the city.’



‘If there is competition for us in Swansea, it is smaller local-based business rather than the bigger firms,’ Morgan Cole’s Mr Pashley observes. ‘For their own various reasons, they have decided it is a market that they haven’t invested in.’



John Collins & Partners has 18 partners and a total of 120 staff based in Swansea, having set up in 1990 with only four partners and 15 staff.



Kevin O’Brien, head of dispute resolution, claims that the Swansea base has not prevented the firm from attracting big-name clients, including Cardiff-based Principality Building Society, Lloyds TSB and Swansea City and County Council. ‘We continue to regard ourselves as a Swansea-based firm, but we are doing work throughout Wales and the UK. In terms of location, we’re happy to stick where we are.’



Legal life outside of the major commercial centres can be a fairly remote experience, but not necessarily an unrewarding one. Gabb & Co, founded in 1760 and which claims to be the oldest firm in Wales, has eight partners at offices in Abergavenny and Crickhowell and a turnover of £2.5 million. ‘We regard ourselves as niche rather than high street,’ explains Steve Meredith, a private client partner who specialises in inheritance tax planning.



He reports that the firm made ‘a conscious decision’ to move away from high street and legal aid practice five years ago. ‘I suspect most of the firms in mid-Wales are two- to three-man-bands. There isn’t so much publicly funded work around, and they might do a mix of crime and straightforward probate and divorce.’ He claims his firm is ‘different to that and in a significantly different market-place’. Instead, the practice sees itself as ‘sitting in the middle of Cardiff and Birmingham’, well-placed to capitalise on a wealthy swathe of the country enjoying retirement or a bolt-hole from the rat race.



‘A lot of people who have a second home and, say, live in London get to retirement age and come to live here,’ he reflects. ‘They will keep with their London lawyers for a couple of years and then it all becomes a bit of a fag, and they start casting their eye around. Hopefully, we are right there when they do that. Certainly, that has been our experience over the last six or seven years.’



Elsewhere, the patchy provision of legal advice, particularly in rural parts and notably in north Wales, means that many parts of the country have become legal aid advice deserts of Gobi-like proportions. Unsurprisingly, concerns are that as a consequence of Lord Carter’s proposed reforms, with its emphasis on economies of scale, the threadbare service will start to unravel completely.



Richard Williams, a partner at Gamlins, based in Llandudno, with seven offices throughout north Wales including Colwyn Bay, Rhos- -on-Sea, Conwy and Bangor, reports the view of a colleague who recently attended a meeting of legal aid lawyers. ‘My understanding is that Carter and his colleagues didn’t actually go west of Chester into north Wales to consider what would be the impact of an economy of scale in this part of the world.’



He says Bangor has two firms and Llandudno three prepared to take on publicly funded work. Any reduction in existing provision would be of ‘great concern’, Mr Williams says. ‘If you look at the criteria in the Carter review, you have to be doing £50,000 worth of contract work to justify continuing, but if you look at the smaller rural courts, such as Pwllheli, then who else is going to do that work if the contracts aren’t issued to the firms which operate in that area?’



Gwilym Hughes & Partners has nine partners and 15 lawyers at its offices in Wrexham and Llangollen, as well as Shrewsbury and Oswestry over the border in Shropshire. ‘If you want to go to a substantial firm that covers more commercial transactions than we do, then you’d have to travel as far as Liverpool or Manchester,’ claims partner Robert Williams. One-third of his firm’s income comes from publicly funded work – but Mr Williams is not too despondent about the government’s plans for legal aid. ‘We have one of the largest legal aid contracts in Wales, if not the largest, and we’ve gone along with the legal aid re-organisation to concentrate on departments that are going to remain profitable, such as the criminal department, because of volume.’



In particular, Gwilym Hughes worked with the Legal Services Commission to provide advice to refugees and asylum seekers who ended up in Wrexham under the government’s dispersal policy. This, Mr Williams says, has helped the firm build ‘critical mass’ in terms of legal aid work. ‘It is a question of having an eye to future opportunities and not being afraid to embrace change.’



Jon Robins is a freelance journalist