2020 will go down in history as the year of Covid-19, the tragic loss of life, lockdowns, social distancing, zoom meetings, face masks and obsessive hand washing. In the UK it might also become known as the year that saw the unravelling of the ‘gold rush’ of law firms listed on the London Stock Exchange. If such an unravelling does occur, it will be hard to put all the blame on the firms themselves. It will be blamed on the economic impact of Covid-19. The wave of listings began with Gately in 2015. In 2017 and 2018 firms listing included Knights, Rosenblatt, Keystone and Gordon Dadds. These were merely a prelude for the biggest listing of them all, DWF in March 2019. It is even possible tha
Will the demand for legal services face a temporary disruption, a longer term downturn or a no-end-in-sight structural change? These are three different degrees of potential economic upheaval triggered by Covid-19. The fourth degree of change is the boom that will be experienced in certain sectors of the economy. Temporary Disruption (short term) Fortunately for law firms the demand for legal services, in most areas of law, falls into the category of short term disruption. Conveyancing: Residential property sales volumes will be down for a couple of months and should then continue where they left off before the Covid crisis. Auctions and open for inspections may change for the foreseeable fu
