I THINK it’s caused big shock waves actually.
It’s been so sudden – there’s not been an opportunity to readjust resources over time. It has to be done very quickly and that’s caused a fair amount of pain across the sector.
The speed and steepness of the decline is what took everybody by surprise. In the middle of last year everyone was aware that things were slowing down but what happened last summer accelerated the decline.
Our view is we’re not niche, but we concentrate on commercial work and that’s the way we intend to continue.
There are different constituencies in the legal sector and for commercial firms to succeed in the future they have to provide the wide range of services that their clients require.
If you’re a full blown commercial firm then you do need to provide a full range of services.
Our mix of work now is a lot different from what it was two years ago. We’re about to run a new business stream in Liverpool, akin to something we run elsewhere.
We’ve just kept very close to the clients we know and are going out to knock on doors making sure that if they have got deals to do or other legal requirements they think of us.
I don’t think we’ve changed our emphasis but the work we’re doing now is different from what we were doing.
Our insolvency work is booming and litigation is up, particularly property litigation.
Internally, we had a review nationally of our resources across the offices and all groups in the early part of this year, which sadly resulted in a number of people leaving the firm.
That was an attempt to ensure our resources matched our workload for the rest of this year.
That’s no different from every other commercial entity in the rest of the country.
In March business sentiment altered and people were being more positive. But I think it’s going to bump along for a while. I don’t think we’re likely to see a sudden resurgence and for small firms it’s going to get much worse. People are wondering what May and June are going to bring, but it’s not possible to say we’re going to climb out of this.
