McClure Naismith ‘in good shape’

LAW firm McClure Naismith suffered a dip in both profit and turnover last year as the Scottish legal sector as a whole grappled with fewer large contracts and pressure to reduce fees.

Turnover slipped 3 per cent to £13.05 million during the 12 months to 30 April, while profit before members’ pay and profit shares dropped almost 15 per cent to £3.4m.

Accounts filed at Companies House show the amount of profit to be shared among the firm’s partners fell to £2.63m from £3.11m the previous year.

A spokesman for the mid-tier firm, which has offices in Glasgow, Edinburgh and London, confirmed it has 36 partners but would not disclose how many were full equity partners.

Chairman Alan Thomson told The Scotsman that 2010-11 had been one of the most challenging years in memory for the Scottish legal sector, but McClure had continued to invest, with the recruitment of several new partners.

Among its most recent hires is former McGrigors lawyer Mark Parkhouse, who is now heading McClure’s insolvency and restructuring business.

Thomson said: “Although 2010-11 was one of the most challenging years for the legal profession, with relatively low volumes of substantial transactional work affecting our turnover, we continued to hire, with three new partners (two in the London office) as well as other key senior staff; we developed new service lines and invested in training, our people and our practice areas.”

“Some areas of our business have performed very strongly, such as litigation, financial services, regulatory work and tax-driven investment work. Overall our performance has been robust and we are well positioned for delivery of an expanding range of legal services and increasing our market share.”

Among the practice’s more high-profile work this year has been managing all of the intellectual property issues around the arrival of the pandas, Tian Tian and Yang Guang, at Edinburgh Zoo.

Staff numbers remained the same over the 12-month period, with 162 legal and support employees divided between the firm’s three offices.

Thomson added: “I would say McClure Naismith is in good shape – we took early action when the recession arrived on the back of the near collapse of the financial system and we have continued to invest in our people, our services and most importantly of all, our clients.”