RSR: ABS seemed like a good idea
A sole practitioner has joined forces with a claims management and marketing company to form an alternative business structure (ABS) with the eventual goal of providing marketing for a range of professionals, including lawyers and accountants.
Beckenham, Kent-based RSR Law received its ABS licence from the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) earlier this month, effective from 1 February 2014.
Solicitor Robert Rocker, who is also the ABS’s head of legal practice and its head of finance and administration, is now one of three directors of RSR Law. He has worked with PinnacleOne, which offers tailored marketing, such as ‘pay-per-click’ internet campaigns and social media marketing, for several years.
RSR Law currently does the legal work for Pinnacle’s sister company, SapphireClaims.com, a claims management company that was founded in 2007 by two former police officers and now operates under the RSR banner. Pinnacle was spun out of Sapphire in 2010 and was its marketing and advertising division.
Mr Rocker, who is a specialist in occupational disease claims, is also legal services director of the website contestawill2win.com, which as the name suggests deals with contentious probate cases. In the past he has worked for Russell Jones & Walker, Pattinson & Brewer, and Berrymans Lace Mawer.
Speaking to Legal Futures, he said the ABS “seemed like a good idea” after a successful working relationship. Pinnacle has done “a lot of marketing and advertising for me and will continue bringing in the work to the firm”.
“It’s either that or I pay for the marketing myself, and that’s quite expensive, so pooling our resources and teaming up… just seemed to make sense, to be honest,” he said.
He added: “The idea in the long run is to do marketing for other types of professional, like accountants or whatever. But that’s a future thing; at the moment we’re just concentrating on bringing in work for this practice.”
Pinnacle also provided the marketing to one other law firm and would continue to do so, he said. “Obviously that will generate revenue for the ABS.”
He said the business was not seeking external investment but would not rule it out, adding: “I don’t know that we’re that attractive, to be honest, and I don’t know that we would appeal at this stage.”
He described the process of obtaining the ABS licence as “arduous”, although “once our application got picked up by the right individual at the SRA, to be fair it was a relatively smooth process”. RSR put in the application in early summer, he said. “There’s a lot of hoops to jump through and it’s a relief to have got through it.”
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