business success
A winning combination
The past 18 months have seen an especially busy period for South Coast law firm Biscoes
Achieving success: Stewart Bulpitt (centre) with Kevin Keegan (left) and David Goodings, from award sponsors College Chambers
Alison Lee took over as managing partner following the retirement of her long-standing predecessor Jean Evans in March 2015 and the following month, it incorporated as a limited company – Biscoes Law. The practice then merged with Graeme Quar & Co in April 2016.
Also putting the icing on the cake, at May’s 2016 annual Hampshire Law Society Awards dinner, Biscoes won Small Firm of the Year.
Lee puts much of the success down to quality of service, the loyalty of clients and the firm’s ability to blend the best of traditional and modern legal services. With offices in Portsmouth, Gosport, Petersfield, Portchester, Waterlooville and Wickham, she says the decision to stay local has proved rewarding.
“As a business, I think we have bucked the trend,” said Lee. “At a time when a lot of law firms were amalgamating and closing branch offices, we made a deliberate decision to brand ourselves as ‘local’ and stay accessible to our longstanding and loyal clients.
“We know our approach is quite unusual but it brings us a very loyal client base, we’re a well- known entity and in some cases we’ve looked after families for generations.
“It’s about maintaining a traditional legal presence and promoting ourselves on quality, but at the same time wanting to be modern and drive the business forward with younger members of the team coming in, which was why we changed the structure of the business.”
Lee is also mindful of the likely impact from the Legal Services Act 2007, which allows non-lawyers
to own and invest in law firms and says having a combination of general practice areas and more specialist skills is important.
“By building specialisms within our more traditional skills areas, we are covering all bases,” she continued. “For example, within our property team we have a specialist lawyer focusing on leasehold extension work, and we also specialise in areas such as immigration, sports law, fertility law and Court of Protection work.
“The merger brought us Graeme Quar & Co’s well-established, highly-regarded team of commercial lawyers, and we have also recruited heavily in the past year.”
Lee is also passionate about Biscoes supporting the communities in which it operates. She is chair of trustees of Pompey in the Community, and other organisations the firm is involved with include Age Concern Portsmouth and Rowans Hospice; while Biscoes also provides pro- bono advice through the CAB network and holds regular Armed Forces advice clinics as part of Forces Law.
Playing a key role in supporting the move to a limited company has been Barclays, which became Biscoes’ bankers just over a year ago.
Stewart Bulpitt is a relationship director in the Solent, Dorset & South Wiltshire corporate team, and Lee is impressed with his knowledge and understanding of the legal sector.
“We met with several banking providers to discuss our needs and our Barclays meeting, led by Stewart, stood out. Barclays demonstrated they had an
understanding of both the peculiarities that exist in running a solicitors firm and our particular needs, and Stewart’s insider knowledge is very helpful.
“I have been very impressed, he is very understanding and accessible and always willing to talk through issues and problems in a positive and proactive way.
“The level of service has been even higher than we expected, Barclays has responded to us seeing partners retire, propose and complete a merger, and other changes, so positively and supportively, that we could not have asked for more.”
Among the services provided by Barclays has been a loan offering to enable up-and-coming future partners to invest in the firm.
Bulpitt explains: “These days, the next generation of partners don’t necessarily have the ability to raise personal finance in the way they did 20 years ago.
“We developed an offering which enables them to invest working capital into the business and become shareholder equity partners. It is sector specific ideas like this, dovetailed with my knowledge of the sector and its peculiarities, which law firms really like.”
Bulpitt has built up that knowledge over the past six years, part of which includes receiving regular updates from the Law Society and the Solicitors Regulation Authority, and says it
Barclays is a trading name of Barclays Bank PLC and its subsidiaries. Barclays Bank PLC is authorised by the Prudential Regulation Authority and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority (Financial Services Register No 122702). Registered in England. Registered number is 1026167 with registered office at 1 Churchill Place, London E14 5HP. September 2016.
ensures that when his legal clients talk about the issues that are likely to impact on their business, he is already one step ahead.
That understanding paid off recently when at the same ceremony as Biscoes’ success, Barclays won Solicitor’s Bank of the Year.
Bulpitt said: “The trophy has pride of place and it was very gratifying to be recognised by the Law Society for all the years of hard work building up my knowledge.”
As well as providing legal expertise, Bulpitt’s ongoing working relationship with Biscoes means the two organisations have collaborated on a series of co-hosted events and provided support for other activities.
The award capped an extremely successful night for the bank as a total of four legal awards were won by Barclays’ customers.
Alison Lee
023 9266 0261
info@biscoes-law.co.uk biscoes-law.co.uk
Stewart Bulpitt 07775 552713
stewart.bulpitt@barclays.com barclays.com
The views expressed in this article are the views of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Barclays Bank PLC Group nor should they be taken as statements of policy or intent of the Barclays Bank PLC Group. The Barclays Bank PLC Group takes no responsibility for the veracity of information contained in the third party guides or articles and no warranties or undertakings of any kind, whether express or implied, regarding the accuracy or completeness of the information given. The Barclays Bank PLC Group takes no liability for the impact of any decisions made based on information contained and views expressed.
THE BUSINESS MAGAZINE – THAMES VALLEY – SEPTEMBER 2016
businessmag.co.uk
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