FA Premier League passes the ball to legal working party members

Solicitors sitting on the boards of directors at top football clubs are seeing an increase in the amount of prestigious legal work they receive after the FA Premier League lost its in-house capacity.Sole in-house solicitor Holly Roper-Curzon left the league a couple of months ago and there are no plans to replace her.Instead, the four members of the FA Premier League legal working party are receiving more work: Maurice Watkins, senior partner of James Chapman & Co and a Manchester United director; Michael Jepson of London firm Gordon Dadds, a Coventry City director; Leeds United director Peter McCormick, senior partner of local firm McCormicks; and Trevor Nicholls, who joined the working party when he was a director of Norwich City.

The club is no longer in the Premier League and Mr Nicholls is not a director, but the working party wanted to retain his expertise.Mr McCormick is leading the working party's work on broadcasting, sponsorship and commercial issues, Mr Watkins handles European regulation, Mr Jepson the negotiations over the revised standard player's contract and Mr Nicholls other regulatory matters.City firm Denton Wilde Sapte, which has represented the league since its inception, is the only external firm used.

Mr McCormick said less work was now going to Dentons and more to the working party.'I'm getting a lot more of it,' said Mr McCormick, adding that he was also receiving instructions from the Football Association.

He said individual members of the working party, which was originally set up to consider the legal issues facing the league, are being instructed directly, although the working party meets four times a year as a group.

Leeds United and the Premier League are now two of McCormicks' top five clients by value.McCormicks is helping Denton Wilde Sapte at the lower end of Dentons' work on the forthcoming broadcasting contract for Premier League football, which could be worth several billion pounds.Adrian Barr-Smith, head of Dentons' sports law team, said the main shift in work occurred two years ago when the league appointed Ms Roper-Curzon.

'The legal working party has rather changed,' he said.

'It is no longer a study group.' Despite this, Mr Barr-Smith said his team was in a 'healthy state' and had just been retained by an unnamed Premier League club.A Premier League spokesman said the new chief executive, Richard Scudamore, had decided not to replace Ms Roper-Curzon as he wanted 'a mixed economy of supply' and 'to buy the right blend of expertise'.

This 'might well' mean using the legal working party 'more extensively', he said, but the spokesman stressed that Dentons had played a valuable role in helping the league fight off last year's restrictive practices case and was heavily involved in the television contract work.X Paul Hackney, chairman of Derby firm Eddowes Waldron, advised former Leicester City manager Martin O'Neill on his move to Celtic last week.See Focus

Neil Rose