A leading international law firm announced wholesale staff cuts, research showed large swathes of practices bailing out of publicly funded work and a leading judge attacked practitioners for squandering state cash.
Eversheds – perhaps the pioneering ‘franchised’ firm in the UK, which experienced exponential growth in the late 1990s and 2000s – announced it was sacking more than 166 staff, about half of which are lawyers. The move gave headline writers in the local legal press an easy pun, as the firm shed staff in the UK and abroad.
Deleting Denmark
Indeed, The Lawyer weekly newspaper reported the firm will be shutting its Copenhagen office entirely in part of a wholesale strategic realignment. But it was in Asia where Eversheds is reported to have made its most significant international moves. The newspaper reported that current global managing partner Lee Ranson is to replace Nick Seddon as the firm’s interim Asia top man, with Mr Seddon leaving the firm.
Back in England, survey results released yesterday pointed to high street lawyers deserting en mass from publicly-funded work. The research showed that a third of family law specialist legal practices intended to withdraw from legal aid work, with large chunks of general social welfare and criminal law specialists also considering jumping ship.
The research – which was co-authored by two University College London academics and jointly sponsored by the Law Society of England and Wales, umbrella regulator, the Legal Services Board, and the UK’s Ministry of Justice – blamed legal aid pay freezes and red tape for the exodus. ‘Almost permanent freezes in rates of pay and increasing control over quality assurance (with associated rises in administrative costs) has led to a concentration of legal aid in fewer firms,’ said the report’s authors.
Squandered funds
But that gloomy climate didn’t prevent a leading family judge from putting the boot into the English legal profession. The Press Association news agency reported on comments from Sir James Munby, head of the family division of England’s High Court, who maintained that lawyers ‘squandered’ public funds on unnecessary legal representation in children cases.
Sir James vented his views in a judgment involving an action between the parents of a baby who had sustained bone fractures and a local government authority. ‘The public purse is not limitless,’ wrote the judge ... ‘We cannot allow scarce public resources to be frittered away and squandered. Every £100 of public money spent paying for the separate representation of litigants in family cases who do not require to be separately represented is £100 unavailable to pay for representation which is required.’
- The changing face of conventional law firm structures was highlighted by moves at another London-based global law firm as magic circle player Allen & Overy announced it was sacking back office staff at its New York and continental European offices and moving the functions to its recently-created legal processing factory in Northern Ireland. According to Legal Week newspaper, the move is bad news for staff in the firm’s New York, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Brussels, Frankfurt, Luxembourg, Milan, Paris and Rome offices, while a boost for its Belfast operation, which was launched in 2011, with financial support from the UK government.
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