Brabners Chaffe Street
No of Partners: 58
No of Assistant Solicitors: 62
Other Fee Earners: 56
www.brabnerschaffestreet.com
Founded in 1820, Brabners Chaffe Street is one of the Liverpool legal scene’s stalwarts beginning to make a noise in the Manchester market too.
While Brabners is a long-established firm, this does not mean that it is staid and the last few years have certainly been busy ones for the firm. In 2001, it acquired the commercial team from Liverpool rivals Berrymans Lace Mawer. The year after, it absorbed the bulk of Manchester corporate practice Chaffe Street. Very quickly the firm grew from a 28 partner Liverpool firm to a 44 partner practice covering the North-west (including a Preston office).
Although it is still recruiting, particularly in Manchester, this phase of frenetic growth seems, for now, to have come to an end while the firm consolidates what it has acquired. Currently, the firm stands at 58 partners (28 in Liverpool, 12 in Manchester and 4 in Preston) and 118 other fee-earners.
The firm is organised around 5 core practice areas – corporate, property, employment, commercial litigation and private client – of which it says the first 2 are its strongest. Although it has a number of blue-chip clients, the corporate practice is primarily aimed at locally-based SMEs and owner-managed businesses while the property practice has a national reputation and sources more than half its work from outside the region.
Indeed, while property practices tend to start as a local firm and go national, Brabners is, in the near future, likely to do the reverse as its home city benefits from a construction boom in the run-up to its reign as European Capital of Culture in 2008. It also has some niche practices, most notably a defamation team that includes EMAP and Trinity Mirror amongst its clients, and a social housing practice which has a long list of public sector and housing association clients throughout the country. Other household names advised by the firm more generally include Exel Plc, Associated British Foods, JD Wetherspoon, Argos and Lever Faberge.
Managing partner Michael Brabner describes the firm’s potential recruitment pool in both Liverpool and Manchester as being a “pretty broad cross-section” of people – from national firm lawyers looking for a slightly more relaxed lifestyle to those from local firms looking to specialise and take a step up. As you might expect, the firm looks for skill and ability from prospective lawyers and, in more senior recruits, demonstrable expertise as well the ability to communicate and get on with clients. But, above all, Brabner says, candidates will also need “the ability to get on with us”.
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