Alternative business structures

A three-way merger into a new alternative business structure has created a top 200 law firm, Legal Futures can reveal. The ABS, Taylor Rose TTKW, is made up of Peterborough-headquartered Taylor Rose Law, its associated costs firm Jaggards, and London firm Tucker Turner Kingsley Wood.

The former chief executive of Quindell Legal Services (QLS) has admitted that he was wrong to sell a business he had built up over 13 years to the troubled plc two years ago. However, Phil Hodgkinson said he had learnt a lot from the “Quindell experience”.

The co-founder of Britain’s only trade union-owned alternative business structure (ABS) has warned high street lawyers that there is nothing to stop it competing with them. He also expressed concern that the profession was becoming obsessed with profit at the expense of the client.

MTA Solicitors, the alternative business structure behind the consumer-facing high street LawStore brand, this week opened its third store and plans to open a fourth by the end of the year. MTA has begun to sign up panels of local law firms to deal with instructions it cannot handle.

A fast-growing consumer credit management group in the middle of acquisition by a company funded by the global investor that also backed LegalZoom, has launched an alternative business structure. Lowell Group employs more than 1,200 people.

Your Legal Friend, a trading name of Liverpool law firm Camps Solicitors, has confirmed that it has launched its long-awaited shareholder group action against Quindell plc.

A Canadian report on alternative business structures has issued a cautious verdict on majority non-lawyer ownership, judging the model to be as yet unproven, based on the experience so far in England and Wales and Australia.

The shareholders who sold national law firm Simpson Millar to Fairpoint Group plc in June 2014 have received their full £3m earn-out after the practice exceeded its first-year financial targets. Fairpoint paid an initial £7m in cash – on a debt-free, cash-free basis – and 1.4m shares in the group.

A barristers’ chambers is set to launch an alternative business structure to help it obtain international work, because it will give the appearance of a solicitors’ firm to foreign clients who do not understand direct access.

Leading accountancy firm Kingston Smith has been granted a wide range of waivers from Solicitors Regulation Authority rules as part of its groundbreaking transfer of alternative business structure regulator. We also have ABS news from Fletchers, Express Solicitors and Legal Recoveries & Collections.