The Good Law Project, the legal campaign group which has brought several high-profile cases against the government, today announced it is setting up its own independent law firm.

Good Law Practice, which plans to open for business from next month, will help run litigation brought by the Good Law Project and its partners and will be headed up by Jamie Potter, currently joint head of Bindmans’ public law and human rights team.

The firm will be regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority and funded by the Good Law Project, which said the practice ‘will make its services available to Good Law Project, and its partners, on terms they can afford’. Any profits it makes will be returned to the Good Law Project.

Jolyon Maugham

Jolyon Maugham

The group’s founder and director Jo Maugham QC said: ‘We want to foster legal structures that help people respond to the world around them. The engagement that follows is, we believe, how we make a better world and fulfil the desire we all share to leave a better world than we found. Delivering on this is my mission.

‘The practice will help us become even more responsive to the needs of the communities that we serve, in a world and a political system that is growing ever more dynamic.’

Potter added: ‘This is an exciting opportunity to build a law firm that can support and facilitate the exceptional work being done by Good Law Project to scrutinise public decision-making through the law, and to empower under-represented groups to participate in a legal system that can often feel impenetrable to the uninitiated.

‘We want Good Law Practice to be a training ground for the public law and social welfare lawyers of the future. Such expertise is invaluable as trust in our political system is eroded, wealth is distributed increasingly unequally and legal aid is constantly narrowed.’

Good Law Practice will start with four qualified lawyers and a number of paralegals and support staff but plans to double in size by the end of this year and has opened a recruitment exercise for lawyers and paralegals, particularly those with knowledge of housing, civil rights and protest law.