Change of plans  

Michelmores entered a new phase of life in 2005 when it moved to a flashy office on Exeter's outskirts and opened a London base on Piccadilly. Since then, it has grown immensely and was drawing up a new strategy to increase in terms of size and turnover even more dramatically – and then... boom, the recession hit. Even if Operation Get Huge Fast (our name for it, not theirs) hasn't gone ahead, the 150-lawyer firm we're left with is still a significant player in the South West, especially in those vast counties of Devon and Cornwall, where even Bristol is just a dot on the horizon.

Michelmores’ practice is split three ways – into business, property and private client – and there are seats available in all those areas. There is also the opportunity to spend six months in Michelmores' London office, in a seat which is a mixture of commercial litigation and property. The lucky secondee receives a rent-free flat in Clapham and a salary rise.

Flybe to the moon 

New starters can spend time in commercial property and property litigation, but the planning department (very highly ranked by our parent publication Chambers UK) has a reputation for being a stellar first seat. At an early stage, trainees are given drafting to do, “of Section 106 agreements and planning applications,” and in addition to liaising with councils, they’re very often able to attend client meetings and sometimes take the lead in them. “I was effectively running things myself,” said one source. “The partner made time to help me – there’s the hope that it will pay them back in the future.” Trainees also have the opportunity to observe appeals and judicial review hearings. The property team acted for Exeter & Devon Airport on the planning aspects of a training academy for Flybe to be built on the airport’s site. It also recently advised a client seeking to build a 96-bedroom student pad on a site where a historic building currently stands. Michelmores' lawyers were able to prove sufficiently that the Planning Committee should not refuse the development on grounds of historic conservation alone.

With a client list including the Met Office, HM Prisons, the Ministry of Justice and Barratt Homes, the commercial property team has acted on some high-value deals this year. It advised the latter client on a regeneration project in Plymouth with a value of over £100m. The project aims to develop 250 new homes and refurbish 60 more in the area of North Prospect. Trainees reported a “real variety of work,” with “more phone-based client contact than face to face,” but adding that the occasional client meeting does still come along.

Michelmores' dispute resolution team is top-ranked by Chambers UK in the South West region. It recently won a judicial review in the High Court against the Secretary of State for Health regarding payments to 'tainted blood' victims. You may have read about it in the press: the firm's client, a composer, contracted HIV and hepatitis C through an NHS blood transfusion and challenged the government's refusal to match higher payouts paid to victims in the Republic of Ireland. The team has also been acting on contractual disputes, trade mark infringement cases and debt recovery matters, among others. Trainees report a good amount of drafting – of claim letters, for instance – and frequent “responsibility to work on your own files.”

The extremely popular employment seat offers trainees the chance to try out contentious and non-contentious work as well as nurturing the different skills necessary to act for “both individuals and companies.” Trainees work on discrete client queries – “just being on the end of a phone offering bits of advice” – and also lengthier disability and sex discrimination cases. The recession’s impact on employers has sparked a boom in contentious work. The team acted for the editor-in-chief of a local lifestyle magazine on her departure from the company: just one example of the senior executive severance matters that are becoming increasingly common. It also acted on behalf of Devon Primary Care Trust in defence of a harassment and discrimination claim brought by a senior family therapy consultant. That case was eventually settled in mediation.

Michelmores' World of Adventure 

Headed by Will Michelmore, the private client team represents an illustrious client base, ranging from landed gentry to celebrities. The team has recently acted for a peer of the realm on the purchase of a farm (he had the intention of converting it to an organic venison farm), and also advised trustees of a West Country estate on the creation of a succession plan for multiple branches of the same family. Furthermore, it acted on the remarkable matter of a dancer who left numerous legacies to a charity in his will but, shortly before his death, made an altered will on a piece of cardboard. Michelmores acted for the charity and the case was resolved eventually through a complex settlement. Trainees, meanwhile, had worked on advising a “managing director who wanted to bring his foreign wife into the country, and we advised on the technical aspects of what to do.”

Clinical negligence is another seat where trainees enjoy close client contact: “I took calls from potential clients when the paralegal wasn’t around – the subject matter was highly personal and it was an interesting skill to develop,” said one. The team works mainly on behalf of claimants, recently netting a claim of £1.5m for a man blinded after delays in diagnosing intracranial pressure. It is also increasingly working on claims relating to overseas cosmetic surgery procedures. A number of the clin neg lawyers are qualified nurses.

Let’s get physical  

Trainees enjoy close contact with partners and – although supervision varies from person to person – most praised the teaching skills of their mentors. “Some reviews are just box-ticking exercises, but in many seats I had good, solid feedback,” one said. Since we're talking about partners, looking through their bios on the firm's website, we note that many of them have come from top City firms – Freshfields, Macfarlanes, Herbert Smith... further proof, if more was needed, that Michelmores may be in the provinces, but the people here are not small-town.

Over the past couple of years the firm has taken on some trainees with unusual backgrounds – perhaps people with quite a few years in industry or who did their degrees as mature students – as well as young bucks straight from law school. A spread of ages and backgrounds, as well as the firm’s location on a business park well out of Exeter centre, means that organising socials can be “a bit of a military operation,” but we’re assured “there is a core group who go out a lot.” Isolated though the office may be, there's a Michelmores bus link, a hairdresser and nail technician come in once a week, and it does have a restaurant and a gym (and a personal trainer) in the basement. Sport is a feature of life at Michelmores – there are “lots of people running marathons and doing 55-mile bike rides.” Trainees are usually able to leave the office by 6pm to pursue whatever physical activity most befits their nature.

And finally...

If you think Exeter's excellent why not explore this expanding firm? The firm's ethos is 'train to maintain', and in 2011, five out of its six qualifying trainees stayed on as NQs.