Sheffield-based Irwin Mitchell has eight offices in England, plus outposts in Scotland and Spain. The firm currently has some 60 equity partners and 75 salaried partners on its books, while employing more than 2,200 staff.

Partnership table

The move immediately allows the firm to boost its current cadre of some 25 non-solicitor senior managers to the partnership table. The licences mean that the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) has approved the appointment of Glyn Barker, the former vice-chairman of the UK side of global accountancy practice PricwewaterhouseCoopers, as chairman of Irwin Mitchell’s parent company. Likewise, the regulator has backed the appointment of former KPMG man Mel Egglenton as chairman of the company’s audit committee.
Five licences were granted by the SRA, covering the limited liability law firm, two trust branches of the business, as well as debt collection and claims management functions.
The move is potentially controversial as it is the first licence to take the new ABS model beyond the English jurisdiction. The devolved Scottish government is currently studying proposals that would bring a form of ABSs north of the border. But continental European jurisdictions have been notoriously nervous – and in some case outright antagonistic – about the concept.
So far, Irwin Mitchell has not commented on the view of regulators in Scotland or Spain in relation to its new business model.

Challenging sector

The business’s chief executive, John Pickering, described the development as ‘a major step forward for Irwin Mitchell’. He said that ABS approval meant the firm could ‘push on with our plans for growing the business. Our group structure has been built with that strength of diversity in mind and we believe it puts us in a very strong position in the changing legal sector’.
The move takes the total of approved ABSs to 19 and SRA chief executive Antony Townsend commented that the multiple licences illustrated ‘that the new legislation gives plenty of scope for all types of applications’.
Mr Townsend continued: ‘Our authorisation system has been built to be flexible enough to deal with a range of organisations with hugely varying corporate structures and robust enough to apply the same stringent suitability criteria by which traditional firms are judged.’