Slater & Gordon's £53.8 million acquisition of Russell Jones & Walker gets the green light

Slater & Gordon’s long awaited acquisition of UK law firm Russell Jones & Walker (RJW) will go ahead on April 30, following the SRA’s approval of its application for an Alternative Business Structure (ABS) licence.

Slater & Gordon, an Australian plaintiff law firm, is no stranger to being at the vanguard of legal developments – it was the world’s first publicly listed law firm in May 2007, and will be the first overseas firm to join forces with a UK firm under the new arrangements permitted by the Legal Services Act.

Slater & Gordon and RJW announced their plans to join forces back in January, after 12 months of negotiations and due diligence, but the SRA’s approval of the necessary SRA licence was only obtained today. 

The equity partners of RJW are understood to have exchanged their traditional partnership interests in RJW for shares in Slater & Gordon, which they will hold for a minimum of four years. Slater & Gordon, prior to the acquisition of RJW, had roughly 1,000 employees operating from a network of more than 50 offices across Australia, whilst RJW had 400 staff across 10 offices.

Neil Kinsella, the RJW Chief Executive believes that the pairing with Slater & Gordon will enable them to stay “at the forefront of a changing legal landscape” and enable RJW “to become the largest and most trusted brand for personal legal services in the UK”. RJW’s legal practice will trade as ‘Russell, Jones & Walker part of Slater & Gordon Lawyers’ from Monday – something of a mouthful for advertising purposes, but presumably a recognition of the fact that, for the time being at least, RJW is a better known name amongst UK clients than Slater & Gordon. The £53.8 million acquisition includes RJW’s Claims Direct business, which it is believed will continue with its existing brand.

It is understood that Slater & Gordon will pay just over £36 million of the acquisition price in cash, of which £8.8m will be deferred for up to two years subject to performance targets, and £10.3m will be used to pay off RJW bank borrowings, with the remaining consideration taking the form of Slater & Gordon in shares.

Andrew Grech, Slater & Gordon Managing Director said “This partnership gives RJW security so that they can continue providing a first class legal service, but it also gives them the resources needed to develop and grow whilst retaining and attracting talented people in a way that would not have been possible otherwise.....The potential to share technology and have greater resources to retain and attract additional talented people will underpin our future success.”

Irish Law Firm Dillon Eustace Ventures Offshore

For the most part, in the past the offshore legal fraternity and its onshore equivalent have kept a respectful distance from each other.  The large commercial offshore law firms are largely reliant on referrals from the key onshore financial centres such as London and New York and have not sought to practice onshore law for fear of being seen to bite the hand that feeds them.  Simply put, the fear is that if they start to try to compete with the magic circle for business not only would the offshore firms be likely to lose, but any referrals would also dry up. So far as the onshore firms are concerned, few of them have made attempts to establish themselves in the offshore centres primarily for two reasons – firstly, they have had bigger fish to fry in the form of other potential new markets which are larger (China, Russia, etc), and secondly it was believed by many that no single onshore firm generated enough offshore business by itself to justify the establishment of an offshore arm (most of the big offshore firms take referrals from almost all of the leading international firms). 

However, the lines between the two are starting to blur.  As reported in the past on this blog, there are signs of some offshore firms moving onshore (such as Ogiers opening up a Luxembourg law practice) and this week Dillon Eustace, the Irish law firm has opened an office in the Cayman Islands, the first EU headquartered firm to do so.  Whilst the Cayman authorities will doubtless be pleased with this vote of confidence in the Islands’ future, the legal fraternity there will be more wary about what the development may mean for them.

The new Cayman firm will offer a range of legal services including commercial litigation, funds establishment, insurance, banking and compliance and regulation.  The firm also plans to establish a corporate services business which, subject to Cayman Islands Monetary Authority approval, it hopes will be open in Q3 2012.

It is perhaps no great surprise that the first moves in the blurring of the boundaries between onshore and offshore have involved jurisdictions which themselves are somewhat hard to pin down in terms of their onshore/offshore status.  Although Luxembourg (where Ogier have established) and Ireland (where Dillon Eustace are head-quartered) both fiercely deny the offshore label, they are very clearly involved in a very significant amount of tax structuring work for a non-domestic client base.  By some definitions, the work that they do is very much “offshore” in nature, and therefore there is undoubtedly a closer similarity between Jersey and Luxembourg, or Ireland and Cayman, than there would be between, say Jersey and England, or Cayman and the US.

However, it will be interesting to watch how Dillon Eustace fares and whether it manages to challenge the dominance of Cayman’s existing legal heavyweights, such as Maples and Walkers and, if it does, whether it tempts some of the more mainstream onshore law firms to follow the path.

NewLaw Legal becomes 4th ABS to be approved

The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) has – not before time – announced the fourth alternative business structure to gain approval under the new Legal Services Act regime. 

Cardiff based solicitors’ firm NewLaw Legal Limited, a personal injury specialist firm established in 2004 by former Eversheds partner Helen Molyneux and Australian lawyer John Gannon, has become the latest organisation to receive a license from the SRA.

It is the first law firm of significant scale to obtain approval, having 250 staff across offices in Cardiff and Glasgow. It seems that the firm should be commended on their patience and tenacity – according to NewLaw’s chief executive, Helen Molyneux, NewLaw was founded in anticipation of the legal services market being opened up to non-lawyer ownership.  I suspect that at the time they did not imagine that it would take 8 years before that aspiration could become a reality.

Nevertheless, all good things come to he who waits, and Ms Molyneux believes that the approval will give added momentum to the joint venture business strategies that the company has been evolving for some time.  The jv strategy has led to the law firm claiming to be the fastest growing law firm in the personal injury field.

The SRA began accepting ABS applications on 3 January and has since received 74 stage two forms from organisations, after initial applications from more than 200 applicants.

ABA rules out non-lawyer ownership of law firms

I have often heard it asserted that whatever happens in US legal circles comes to the UK eventually (generally about 10 years later)  – a cliche which portrays the US as a dynamic legal environment with which the staid and stuffy old British profession struggles to keep up.  Like most cliches, there is at least a grain of truth in it - the culture of litigation, compensation and “ambulance chasing” lawyers, for example, was clearly a trend which had its roots in the US, but which has taken a strong hold on this side of the Atlantic in recent years.  But in relation to reforms of the ownership structures of law firms, it seems to be the UK and Australia which are the more forward-thinking as, for the second time in 12 years, the American Bar Association (ABA) has decided not to change its rules to permit a degree of non-lawyer ownership of law firms. 

In December of last year the ABA's Commission on Ethics 20/20 released a draft paper suggesting that non-lawyers employed by a law firm could hold a minority (up to 25%) financial interest in the firm and share in its profits, something which is currently prohibited in all US jurisdictions other than Washington DC, largely due to concerns that non-lawyers are not subject to the same ethical standards as lawyers. However, the Commission released a statement earlier this week which said that after soliciting feedback from the legal community, "there does not appear to be a sufficient basis for recommending a change to ABA policy on non-lawyer ownership of law firms."  This means effectively that the proposals are dead, which will come as a blow to those eager to shake up the way law firms in the US are funded.

The proposals that have been rejected were in fact already far more modest than the reforms which have been introduced in the UK and Australia.  The idea of permitting broader forms of non-lawyer ownership, including publicly-traded law firms, external investment in law firms by third parties, and mixed-professional practices had been ruled out much earlier in the consultation process, and what remained under debate was a fairly modest proposal to allow non-lawyers a minority percentage of the equity.  Nevertheless, it seems it was a step too far for the Americans, who have firmly rejected the notion of any change.

The official line is that the ABA’s members do not see a need for change, and fear it would lead to an erosion of ethical standards and professionalism  - a view which was publicly promulgated recently by the general counsel of 9 of the US’s largest companies (and about which I have blogged previously).  However, the fear of some of the more progressive members of the US legal fraternity, such as Thomas Gordon, legal and policy director for Washington DC non-profit Responsive Law, is that the decision is more about lawyers protecting their own monopoly than about genuine concern for what is best for users of the legal system.  He has gone on record as saying "We're sitting here well into the twenty-first century, and the ABA has decided not to even bring the business of the practice of law to the 1980s."  

I find it hard not to have some sympathy with this view.  Whilst ethical standards are of course of paramount importance in the practice of law and great care needs to be taken to ensure that any changes in structure do not result in a diminution professional standards, the retention of a closed-shop monopolistic system raises ethical issues of its own.  There are many who might argue that clients would be getting a better service and better value for money if the monopoly was a little less tight.

In my view the Legal Services Act reforms should not be seen as a threat by law firms – they should be seen as an opportunity to bring into the profession some of the best elements of other business models and a talent pool which would have previously been unavailable to it at the most senior levels.  It seems that this is an opportunity which our American cousins will not have for some years to come.

ABS application progress remains painfully slow

When the Solicitors Regulatory Authority approved the first 3 Alternative Business Structures on 26th, 27th and 28th March, it was hoped that this was a sign that the log-jam of applications which had built up would start to ease, and that the application process would speed up.


It seems that this was a forlorn hope.  Some 3 weeks after the initial approvals, not a single further approval has  been forthcoming, which is a matter of continuing frustration for a number of applicants who are finding the process cumbersome, opaque and slow.


Whilst the SRA clearly has a duty to ensure that it discharges its obligations diligently, there is a growing feeling that the system is unnecessarily complex and time-consuming to negotiate.  

Why do so many lawyers have an unshakeable sense of their own superiority?

There is something about the legal profession that seems all too often to foster an innate sense of moral superiority amongst its participants; a superiority which is often quite simply not justified in practice. Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in a letter to the American Bar Association’s Ethics 20/20 Commission written by nine general counsel of very significant global business.  The letter contends that any form of non-lawyer ownership of law firms is bad for clients, and that any proposal to permit it “opens the door to arrangements that make the practice of law more like other businesses and less like the distinct profession it has always been”.

They said supporters of reform have not made the case for it: “Our tenures as general counsel have given us no reason to believe that our business clients will be better served by a legal profession that is open to non-lawyer ownership. Quite the contrary, we fear that the inevitable chipping away at the profession’s professionalism ultimately will do a disservice not just to the business clients we serve, but to all clients who seek the trusted and confidential advice of counsel.”

Let’s just look at some of those points in detail.  Firstly, there seems to be a clear implication that making the practice of law more “business like” is a bad thing.  What do they mean by that?  One might assume that here they are distinguishing businesses as being motivated by profit, as opposed to professions which are supposedly motivated by vocation or a sense of justice, and consequently suggesting that it would be a bad thing if the legal profession was more business like.  But in the land of 2,000 hour billing targets and eat-what-you-kill mentality amongst many law firms, this rather rings hollow.  Anyone who believes that the majority of law firms are not focused on profit is, frankly, deluded.  If it was true, why would there be such frenzied interest in the PEP figures published each year? Why would billing targets be set so high, and so rigorously monitored? Indeed, the authors do in fact acknowledge that maximising profit is already a fact of life in the legal profession, but seem to suggest that by allowing external investment, the situation would be further exacerbated.  I am not sure there is any evidence to support that contention.  Is it really credible that at the moment, the big multi-national law firms reach a point at which they say they have made enough profit and start behaving in a more altruistic manner?  I think not.  

Of course there are areas of law where practice is truly vocational and the participants carry out often thankless work despite the lack of a stellar (or sometimes even any) remuneration – those who dedicate long hours to low paid cases for disadvantaged people, for example – and very laudable they are too, but these are very much the exception rather than the rule, and by and large they operate in areas of law which are not the focus for the authors of the letter.  I can’t imagine that CISCO or IBM are really fighting the cause for lawyers working pro bono on immigration cases, for example, and even if they were then it is hard to see that these types of areas would be those targeted by many non-lawyer owners of legal businesses, as they are simply not remunerative enough. 

So if we accept that the majority of lawyers are indeed already trying to make a good profit, then why would external ownership of law firms and the introduction of a “business like” approach really make much of a difference?  The changes to law firm ownership are not just about allowing private equity firms to invest in legal business, it is also about allowing individuals with different professional backgrounds to participate in the equity of the business, and it is difficult to see why they should be any differently motivated than the lawyers themselves.  And why, indeed, should the majority of lawyers, who are concerned with making a good profit, be embarrassed about that simple fact, provided they are delivering a good and valuable service in a free market?

So if it is not the profit motive that the letter is targeting in its condemnation of a “business” approach in law, then what else could it be?  A focus on efficiency and client service?  It strikes me that if they think applying business principles to these areas of law would be a bad thing, then they are very wrong.  It never ceases to amaze me that long after even the banks dragged themselves into the 21^st century and started focusing on accessibility, transparency and client service – by offering 24 hour online banking and extended opening hours at physical branches, for example – most law firms are still stuck very firmly in the 20^th century.  Yes, in the rarified world of the general counsel of some of the world’s biggest companies, I am sure that there is a great deal of satisfaction with accessibility – no right-thinking commercial lawyer would be without a smart-phone nowadays, and available to jump to a client’s tune whatever the time of day or night provided the billing rate is high enough.  But this is a very far cry from the practice of law experienced by ordinary members of the public, who may want some conveyancing done, or help with a divorce, or a will, or a criminal charge.  By and large (there are a handful of honourable exceptions), they will have to put up with pretty arcane practices.  Few people can instruct a lawyer online.  Most will have to make appointments in person, within limited office hours, no weekend opening and with little idea of how much it will all cost.  In this day and age, that is simply not good enough.  Why can’t people instruct lawyers online, using automated workflow systems?  Why can’t they routinely use skype or non-standard hours services?  The simple answer is that most lawyers have not bothered to use technology to improve accessibility because they haven’t wanted to, not because clients wouldn’t welcome it.  And thanks to the closed-shop world of lawyering, they have been able to get away with it for years, because there were precious few firms offering anything better.  It is early days to assess the impact of the ABS reforms in the UK, but I for one do not think it is a coincidence that for the first time we are starting to see a small number of UK firms challenging some of the traditional business models, and using technology to deliver better service and accessibility to clients.

But this isn’t just my view – only a month ago the UK Chief Legal Ombudsman released a new report saying that the legal profession must learn the value of clearer pricing information and good customer service or risk falling behind more marketing led companies in the long run.  The man who sees more situations than anyone where the client/lawyer relationship has gone wrong is himself calling for a more business-like approach to client service, which would tend to suggest that the authors of the letter are kidding themselves about the status quo

So I would contend that they were quite wrong to suggest that running law firms like a business would be a bad thing.  The truth is, law firms already have the business discipline of chasing profit, but they have got away for years without having to truly deliver on the client service side of the business equation, because they operate within an artificial market with limited competition.

But what of some of the other statements in the letter?  There is a statement that allowing non-lawyers to have an interest in law firms will result in a “chipping away....at professionalism.... [which] ultimately will do a .... to all clients who seek the trusted and confidential advice of counsel.”  So, are we supposed to believe that only lawyers can be trusted to have professional standards?  Or to maintain confidentiality?  What about accountants?  Or doctors?  Or counsellors?  It is staggeringly hubristic for lawyers to look down their noses at the professionalism of others.

The authors go on to say that  “And our discussions with other lawyers and in-house counsel have revealed no great interest in or need for non-lawyer ownership, let alone any groundswell of support for such a change.”  But with respect time and time again, when considering change in the profession lawyers consider the question from the wrong end of the telescope, by asking themselves what they the lawyers want to happen, and not what would be the best for the clients they serve.  It is hardly a great surprise that lawyers themselves are not likely to be banging down the door to allow non-lawyers to encroach into a world which has been a closed shop up until now.  What business would lobby to allow greater competition against them? 

The authors of the letter seem to have a very rose-tinted view of a profession motivated solely by the best interests of the client, working tirelessly to uphold justice, and with very little customer dissatisfaction.  And that may well be what the world looks like from the ivory towers of some of the world’s biggest companies, where law firms will bend over backwards to tend to their clients’ needs.    But that was not the end of the market that the Legal Service Act in the UK was designed to improve, it is not the part of the market that the US is currently debating, and it is not the real world for millions and millions of people who have to engage the services of lawyers through no fault of their own and who find the experience confusing, inconvenient and expensive.  A look at the complaints statistics regarding lawyers will show how much better the legal market could be.  And I for one believe that bringing in some new blood – people with different business backgrounds from lawyers – could be just what is needed to improve the lot of the vast majority of the population in their interaction with their legal advisers.

I gave this article a deliberately provocative title.  There are some great lawyers around.  There are some truly motivated people who will bend over backwards to provide a good service, and hope that they can make a good living out of doing so.  And so should they.  But it is very dangerous territory to think that there is something special or different about law that makes it and its practitioners somehow superior to others.  The real winners from the changes sweeping through the legal profession will be those who use the changes to improve the system, and not those who stick their heads in the sand and look at the issue only from the perspective of the lawyers themselves.

Legal Services Board Report into the Legal Services Act a Damp Squib

The Legal Services Act 2007 (LSA) was designed to increase competition in the legal market and to put the consumer at the heart of the regulatory system.  Half way through the first year of Alternative Business Structures (ABS) having been permitted, The Legal Services Board (LSB) has released an interim report into what impact the LSA has had on the profession.  The overall conclusion is, rather disappointingly, that it is “too early to tell’. 

This does rather beg the question of whether there was really any point in releasing a report at a time when only 3 ABS have been approved (2 of which were very small existing law practices, and all 3 of which were only approved 2 weeks ago).  It would be inconceivable that these 3 firms could have had any material impact on the legal market as a whole, much less to achieve it within 2 weeks of approval.  Of course, if only 3 legal business had applied for ABS status, then it might indeed have been a noteworthy finding that there had been so little interest as it could be seen as an indicator that the LSA was likely to fail in its main aim of stimulating competition, but this is not the case. It is known that at least 60 stage two ABS applications have been submitted, after initial interest from almost 180 organisations.  There has been much frustration on the part of the applicants at how opaque the system for approval is and how long it is taking.  Indeed, when the first 3 firms were approved by the SRA a couple of weeks ago, there was some hope that the log jam may start to move but since then, there has been a resounding silence and no further approvals granted.

Although the report claims to establish a “baseline” against which the profession will be measured annually in the future against 17 key indicators, surely it would have been more appropriate to do this either immediately before the ABS regime came into effect (ie 6 months ago), or after sufficient time for it to have had an impact?  In publishing now, it seems a lot of effort has been put into producing a 78 page report which is notable mostly for its lack of useful analysis. 

In some ways perhaps it is harsh to blame the LSB for the timing of the report.  6 months in to the new regime they should have been able to except to see much clearer signs of what changes the LSA was bringing in its wake, but this has been thwarted by the funereal pace at which ABS applications are being processed by the SRA. 

Nevertheless, neither organization has really come out of the first 6 months with much credit so far. 

What £15 million of marketing spend has bought QualitySolicitors

When QualitySolicitors (QS) announced that they were to spend £15 million on advertising, and had hired Saatchi & Saatchi to help, it made a lot of lawyers sit up and take notice.  UK lawyers have traditionally taken a fairly low-key approach to advertising, and it is extremely rare to see prime time television ads outside of the realms of personal injury claims.  Opinions were divided on whether the QS approach was a sign of things to come for the industry, or a monumental waste of money.  Well, it is far too early to say whether the £15 million was money well spent, but we can now see the advert they have come up with, as it is available on You Tube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4knygiE7aAE&feature=youtu.be . 

I have to say, I like it.  Designed to work alongside the firm’s “For Whatever Life Brings” strap-line, the ad is fairly subtle and understated, showing people in a variety of life-changing situations where they are likely to need a lawyer. 

The sound-track to the advert (Jimmy Cliff's 'Hard Road To Travel') is wonderful and soulful, and I can see singer Rachel K Collier having a hit with it as a consequence of the exposure.  But most importantly, a great sound-track means people are likely to stick with what is otherwise a fairly long (90 second) advert.  It’s a million miles away from the brash “Have you been injured at work?” adverts we are used to seeing, with loud presenters endlessly repeating phone numbers to call, and seems to be aimed at a somewhat more sophisticated audience.   I think most of the public are likely to respond positively to it - somehow the aggressively commercial approach to television legal advertising up to now has always seemed to jar somewhat with the values of professionalism and integrity that most of the public want from their lawyers.  The QS ad seems to strike a good balance.  In fact, if there is any criticism of the advert that I have, it is that the actual promotion of QS's name is perhaps a tad too subtle – coming only right at the end, and in a very under-stated way. 

Nevertheless, it is classy and I am sure it well help to build a quality brand for the 350 firms signed up under the QS banner so far.  Of course, attracting clients to a brand is one thing, keeping them is quite another; QS will have to deliver the goods in service terms if it is to have the real impact in the high street that it is aiming for.  But getting clients in through the door in the first place is a good start.

High street firms need to be applying some serious thought to how they are going to respond.  Clearly, most can't dream of spending anything approaching this amount of money on advertising, so they are going to have to work out how else to defend their positions in an increasingly competitive market.

Walkers rocked by law firm departures following sale of its trust company

The politics of law firms owning subsidiary businesses have always been complex, as partnerships are far from ideal structures within which to hold valuable capital assets.  It came as no great surprise, therefore, to see Walkers selling its trust company business to Intertrust. 

What has come as something of a bigger surprise is the fall-out for the remaining firm.  7 partners and 3 associates from Walkers’ legal practice have this week jumped ship and joined fierce rival, Maples and Calder.  

Walkers partners Julian Ashworth, Heidi De Vries, Sheryl Dean, David Marshall, Philip Millward and Gwyneth Rees, and senior associates Philip Dickinson, Patrick Head and Lucy Nicklas will all be joining Maples' Cayman Islands office as soon as their existing contracts allow them to do so and the necessary immigration approvals have been obtained. Partner Tim Clipstone will be joining the firm's BVI office. In a relatively small jurisdiction, a move of 9 lawyers in one go will have a significant impact, particularly given that they are all funds lawyers.  It will leave the Walkers fund team very badly depleted.

Reading between the lines of the carefully worded statements put out by both firms involved, it seems that the partners who have left are all salaried rather than equity partners.  As such, they are unlikely to have benefited materially, if at all, from the sale proceeds and will doubtless be unhappy that any expectation of income in the future from trust company business will have disappeared (at least until any restrictive covenants have expired and the firm is free to set up a new fiduciary business).  It does not take a rocket scientist to work out that there will always be winners and losers when a partnership asset is sold, and the most likely ones to feel aggrieved are those who failed to make it to equity partnership in time.  However, other firms have managed the transition in the past without such significant protest and Walkers might have expected to be able to weather any period of unhappiness without such a major loss of manpower.  Walkers must now be reflecting on why their experience has been so different.

The whole situation does demonstrate the need for very careful handling of these situations.  Walkers is not the first offshore law firm to sell its fiduciary business and nor will it be the last.  There are many reasons why law firms do tend to arrive at a point where strategically it makes sense to sell a subsidiary business and it is a tricky balancing act to achieve this without destabilising the parent law firm.  In some cases this may involve sharing sale proceeds outside of the equity partner group, so that there is not such a stark contrast between the winners and losers. In others it may involve a restructuring of the remaining law partnership, as some firms take the view that it is easier to relax the rules on equity participation or other forms of profit sharing if that does not entail giving away an interest in a large capital asset.  And in other cases it is simply a question of excellent communication to explain why, strategically, a sale is the right thing to do, and why the future still looks exciting for those working in the legal practice.  It can be achieved, and has on many occasions.  But it is far from easy, as Walkers’ experience this week has so ably demonstrated.

Allen & Overy, Freshfields and Axiom all fall for the charms of Belfast

For some time now the pressure has been increasing on law firms to enhance efficiencies and to lower costs, as clients start to jib at paying City rates for relatively routine work.  An obvious way of doing this is to relocate staff or outsource routine work to a lower cost jurisdiction, but lawyers have always been wary about the difficulties of maintaining quality under this model, fearing that clients would not be happy dealing with far flung locations and strange time zones, and that quality of service may be difficult to maintain.

It seems that Northern Ireland has taken the opportunity to position itself as an ideal location from which firms can lower their cost base without many of the attendant difficulties of dealing with more distant centres such as India, with some success. And in order to make its proposition more attractive, it is offering significant financial incentives through regional development agency Invest Northern Ireland (“INI”) to lure firms to the territory; a strategy which seems to be having some success.

INI has already agreed £2.5 million of funding for Allen & Overy which is aiming to have 300 employees in Belfast by 2014.  Of these, approximately 50 are expected to be newly created fee-earning jobs and 250 will be support roles relocated from elsewhere (presumably mainly from London).  The subsidy being offered by INI to A&O therefore equates to about £8,000 per head, which is certainly not to be sniffed at.

Freshfields has also announced that it plans to create 26 new fee earner roles in Belfast, and will receive a grant of approximately £10,000 per employee from INI for their trouble.

The latest law firm to follow the same path is Axiom, which has launched a new centre in Belfast after being offered up to £1.6m in public funding to make the move.  Axiom’s new Northern Irish operation hopes to create over 100 lawyer and para-legal jobs in the city by 2014.

INI is believed to have offered Axiom up to £1.1m over an eight year period and the Department of Employment and Learning is reported to have offered an additional sum of up to £500,000 for skills development.

The financial incentives being offered are no doubt attractive to the firms involved, but the real prize is that the firms should benefit from a well educated, English-speaking talent pool in a city with a materially lower cost base than it would experience in London.  The long term potential benefits to Belfast are significant in terms of stimulating its local economy and offering prospects to its talented young people, so the short term financial invectives are probably a very astute move to secure the City’s long term future.  I would expect that more firms will follow suit before long.