Increased competition is to be welcomed – and weathered – but not worried about

ENTRANTS to the Leeds legal market should be viewed as positive because they help prove the size and vibrancy of the regional market, rather than act as apocalyptic horsemen for under-performing firms, leading lawyers in the city have said.
Addleshaw Goddard’s Tim Wheldon said the appearance of firms who are new to Leeds, such as Bevan Brittan last month and Freeths last year, “shows that people think there are opportunities to do business here”.
He added: “There appears to be enough there to support those businesses and its great from everyone’s perspective.
“I don’t think we are going backwards, having new entrants shows there are still the opportunities to prosper.”
But Paul Cotton, of Eversheds, thought that the strengths of the Leeds legal market – which he described as “mature, vibrant, entrepreneurial, innovative and very high calibre” – presented significant barriers to newcomers.
“There are firms that have tried to crack the Leeds market and they are still trying to crack it,” he said. “There are some very long established firms in Leeds. It’s not easy for a firm to arrive and make huge inroads into a market that is well fed by the legal community.”
He also echoed a degree of scepticism that was commonly expressed towards the accountancy firms looking to take a share of legal revenues.
“I am sure there’s a type of work that is suited to the accountants,” he said. “But they have tried it before and failed.”
Walker Morris’s Ian Gilbert believes the accountancy firms’ business models will mean they struggle to provide legal services to clients with the right levels of cost and independence.
He said: “The big firms of accountants are quite clever because they spend most of their time playing down their interest in the legal marketplace but my suspicions are they are doing their level best to grow their expertise in those markets where they think they can make a good margin.
“That’s potentially more competition and could lead to a confrontation between the large accountancy practices and the independent law firms but the large accountancy practices have very high operating cost models and so their expectations in terms of fee recovery will be significantly higher than the conventional law firms, so that might be a positive. It’s an interesting dynamic.
“Clients generally like to feel they have got sometimes an independent view in terms of their advice and they value that and don’t want to be commoditised by the large firms of accountants.
“The challenge for the lawyers, who are hearing a lot of noise about new structures, is not to forget we are a profession and we should be providing high-quality impartial advice. If we do that we should weather most of the storms.”

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