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Anon,

30/100 would be top price for good clean work from a well run and managed firm.

There are number of flaws with a pre-pack.:

1. Capacity, who has the spare capacity to take on let's say 10,000 files (which would be what 50 -100 fee earners and a floor space of say 8000 square feet? Or do you have so many fee earners that you can just give them all another 20 files? There are probably only 2 who could do this and I wouldn't put MI money on one of them touching this with a long pole and the other is losing enough money of its own to look for new ways to burn cash.

2. So it could be a sale back to existing management / vendors of the acquired firms, but who buys a dysfunctional company that is burning money (apart from S&G that is)?

3. Freedom to instruct, you will need to obtain the consent of each client to the sale of the file.

4. Then there's the payment, is there going to be an upfront £ or is this going to be on earn out? Personally given the clear failures in due diligence on the Quindell acquisition I can't see the book value giving sufficient confidence to allow for a big upfront spend on acquisition so probably a discounted earn out and this won't look good to the IP given the unenviable job of doing the deal.

But in reality we should be hypothesising as to why the person left after 2 months which, to put it in context is 2/3 of the probation period for our junior associates.

We don't know the answer, but we can rule out that there was some extraordinary good news, a return to profit and +ve cash flows and well, one cannot be associated with that now?