Pinsent Masons confident as revenues reach £362m
LAW firm Pinsent Masons was in bullish mood this morning as it reported double digit revenue growth for the 2014/15 financial year, boosted by the success of the 2012 McGrigors merger and its growing international presence.
The firm, which has an office on Park Row in Leeds, achieved global turnover of £362.2m, up 12% on last year.
The results follow a year of expansion at the firm. In March it announced plans to open offices in Sydney and Melbourne, before making up a record 29 partners to take the firm’s partnership to over 400.
Chris Booth, head of Pinsent Masons’ Leeds office, said: “The firm’s international expansion will continue to benefit our regional client base, as will the results coming out of the local and UK markets in which they operate. Certainly we are starting to see renewed confidence and enter the new financial year with our tails up.”
The Leeds office has been boosted by the appointment of Jan Bessell, who joined in November as a strategic planning advisor, having previously been a senior examining inspector at the Planning Inspectorate.
Energy specialist Melanie Grimmitt also helped to cement the firm’s role as sole legal adviser to E.ON.
Standout mandates for the firm over the period included advising Heidelberg Cement on the UK aspects of the $1.4bn sale of Hanson Building Products, the firm’s biggest corporate deal for 2014, with a team led by Andrew Kerr in the Leeds office.
The recent IPO of Cairn Homes represents the first first large Irish house builder to go public since the nineties; Leeds-based partner Andrew Black led the advisory team from the firm.
Regionally, a cross-departmental team from the Leeds office has acted on around £500m worth of student accommodation deals for university clients delivering over 6,500 new units of student accommodation for the Universities of Sussex, Manchester and Gloucestershire and City University.
Also locally, the corporate and banking teams advised Mamas & Papas on its sale to Private Equity firm Blue Gem Capital, worth £25m.
John Cleland, managing partner at Pinsent Masons, says: “It has been a positive year in which we have reaped the rewards of several significant investments we have made over a number of years.
“The McGrigors merger, new offices in Paris, Munich and Istanbul, and significant lateral hires into Asia and the Middle East have all played their part.
“What this demonstrates is how crucial strategic investments are to profitable growth. This has been an ‘investment-lite’ year by our own recent standards I would anticipate that over the next year we will make more investments than we did in the year just passed. That will start with the launch of our new offices in Sydney and Melbourne, but won’t end there.
“We’ve made great progress towards our vision of becoming an international leader in the global sectors in which we operate, and these results position us well to move further and faster in that direction.”
