DLA Piper
No of UK Partners: 345
No of UK Assistant Solicitors: 771
Other UK Fee Earners: 311
www.dlapiper.com
Of all the firms which started life in the regions, DLA Piper has arguably had the most success in transcending its roots. The firm has developed a London office the envy of its national rivals, an international network which spans 29 offices in 21 jurisdictions and, at the time of writing, looked set to become the first national firm to pull off a transatlantic merger.
The firm’s ultimate ambition is to be a top 5 European full service law firm with a significant presence in Asia. Some of its competitors suggest that this success on the world stage means that the firm is no longer interested in the markets and clients on which the firm made its fortune.
The suggestion is met with typical robustness by DLA Piper’s Manchester office managing partner, Roy Beckett. “That’s drivel,” he says.
“If all we were concentrating on was national work, we would just have a London office and put everyone else in one location in the regions. We are determined to be pre-eminent in the north-west.”
DLA Piper’s North-west offices are home to 550 of the firm’s 3,600-strong staff, 294 of whom are lawyers. Approximately two-thirds of these are based in Manchester. The remainder work in Liverpool, which is the hometown of Alsop Wilkinson, the firm which merged with Yorkshire’s Dibb Lupton Broomhead to spawn the phenomenon that is DLA Piper.
The firm is clearly the market leader in the commercial and property arena in Merseyside and is vying with Addleshaw Goddard and Eversheds to be number 1 in Manchester. As with the rest of the UK network, the north-west offices are full-service, but have particular strengths in banking, insolvency, property, corporate, IP, litigation, projects and commercial.
Another strength in Manchester is private equity as well as a developed national practice in commercial regulation, which, the firm claims, is the country’s best outside London. DLA Piper estimates that around half of its work comes from outside the region, while its local plc client base includes names such as Pilkington, Coors, Land Securities Trillium and SSL International.
The firm claims to offer a London service at regional rates, and, while it certainly likes to recruit London lawyers into the north-west, potential recruits do not necessarily have to have a City or other national name on their CVs. In fact, of all the leading national firms, DLA Piper is the least likely to prioritise the conventional criteria applied by most law firms.
“The backgrounds of our lawyers is very varied,” Beckett says.
“Just because somebody begins their career at a lower tier firm doesn’t mean that they can’t be successful. We require a good level of legal skill, but we recruit as much on personality – outgoing people who clients can relate to. We don’t have backroom boys.”
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