,LIVERPOOL law firm Silverbeck Rymer plans to create around 200 new jobs at its Brunswick Business Park premises in the city’s former South Docks.
The insurance litigation specialist expects to recruit solicitors, legal executives and call centre staff.
The jobs boost for Liverpool is part of a plan to expand the firm’s workforce by a total of 300 staff over the next two months, with the remainder of the new jobs to be based at Silverbeck Rymer’s Chelmsford office.
It also follows an agreement, announced earlier this year, to sell the 66-year-old city law firm to the Alternative Investment Market- quoted insurance services group, Quindell Portfolio, for £19.3m. That deal is subject to approval from the Solicitors Regulation Authority and the Financial Services Authority.
Silverbeck Rymer is currently owned by brothers Jim and Charles Rymer.
The law firm will become Quindell Legal Services, though it will continue to trade as Silverbeck Rymer.
The law firm’s HR and people development director, Jill Harrison, said: “We are driving the business forward through growth and creating job opportunities at every level.
“Quindell is an exciting, rapidly- growing group with a great track record of delivery. Its positioning as a thought leader and belief in improving margins whilst lowering costs for the industry sits well with our philosophies of working alongside insurers to help combat fraud and other areas of cost escalation, while being an active promoter of fairness and protector of consumer rights and championing industry change."
Silverbeck Rymer was founded by Nathan Silverbeck, who established the firm in 1946.
Jim Rymer joined as an article clerk, later becoming a partner and remains at the helm as chairman.
Changes, which came into effect last year under the Legal Services Act 2007, have made it possible for UK law firms, of which there are approximately 10,000, to raise capital by floating on the stock market or to form new business structures by bringing in non-lawyers, such as accountants, as partners.
New entrants will also be allowed to offer legal services. They must be approved as an ABS – an alternative business structure – which can take advantage of the new reforms.
The changes to the UK’s £23bn legal market are so profound that they have been likened to the Big Bang of 1986 that reshaped banking by deregulating the City of London.
