Norfolk and broader
Until 1998, Mills & Reeve had just two offices, in Cambridge and Norwich, and had a reputation as East Anglia’s leading firm. Expansion into Birmingham and then London at the turn of the millennium saw it extend its influence beyond one region. Then, when Addleshaw Goddard excised its family teams in 2008, Mills & Reeve was there to snap them up, and so established Manchester and Leeds offices. Cambridge and Norwich are full-service, Birmingham “virtually so,” while the other three are more specialist.
A five-year strategic plan drawn up in 2008 set the focus on six core practice areas: higher education; health; private client; significant business; local authorities; and insurance. The strategy for the moment, says training partner Brian Marshall, is to “accelerate Birmingham towards being completely full-service and to invest more in Cambridge, as it is the best positioned office to draw work out of London.” Read more about the M&R game plan in our interview with Brian Marshall here.
Trainees are hired to Norwich, Cambridge and Birmingham, and with seat options including agriculture, construction, corporate/commercial, banking, employment, education, family, healthcare, insurance, real estate, regulation, technology and tax, there really is something for everyone. No seat is compulsory (though a stint in real estate is encouraged) and trainees complete six, each lasting four months. They don’t always get their first choice, but will almost certainly get to visit the seat they are really desperate for at some point.
If they want to, and if business needs permit it, trainees can take seats in any of the other offices – Manchester, London and Leeds included. Several current trainees had taken up this option, but moving is not compulsory and many remain in their ‘home’ office for the entire two years of their training.
Playboy money
Mills & Reeve’s family practice is unquestionably one of the best in the country, gaining top rankings for East Anglia, the Midlands, Yorkshire and the North West in Chambers UK. It’s very popular with trainees, who are given “a lot of client contact right from the word go,” and they regaled us with colourful stories of their time in this seat. Many of the clients in East Anglia are the middle-rich, “wealthy enough to instruct us to deal with their divorce, but not so wealthy that the money doesn’t matter,” whereas in Birmingham it’s more “multimillionaire property developers and international playboys.” In whichever city this seat is taken, there’s “plenty of court action” to be had. “Once they trust you, they are happy for you to attend court hearings on your own with counsel.”
Private tax and estate planning is another common destination for those who enjoy acting for individuals. “You hear the word tax and think ‘oh my gosh’,” but our sources had enjoyed running their own files, drafting simple wills and going to client meetings.
At the moment, most of the firm’s corporate work takes place in Cambridge and Norwich (Chambers UK ranks it as the standout performer in East Anglia). In 2010, Mills & Reeve established itself as an official referral partner of Freshfields. That means the magic circle firm passes on work that cannot be handled cheaply enough by its own lawyers. One such matter was on behalf of brewing group StarBev. M&R worked on the restructuring of its companies in seven jurisdictions following its $3bn purchase by CVC Capital Partners. The group has also advised Cambridge University Press on the $10m acquisition of a majority stake in Indian publisher Foundation Books, and other clients include insurance company Aviva and fertility clinic Bourn Hall. Trainees handle “due diligence and all that comes with that,” and also get involved with drafting the ancillary documents on deals. The finance team is a leader in East Anglia and acts for most of the major British banks and a couple of overseas ones.
As a countercyclical practice, insurance is “absolutely rammed” with work at the moment. There has been more activity in the sector because of the recession, as parties seek to blame each other and recoup money lost in projects and transactions. The firm says it has also seen an increase in the number of disputes relating to fraudulent insurance claims. “I spent a lot of time dealing with initial matters as they came in,” reported one source, “drafting the initial report, fact finding, evidence gathering and drafting instructions to counsel.”
The health sector represents over 20% of the firm’s turnover. With the NHS undergoing massive structural changes, there is plenty to keep this practice busy. “One half of my work was to do with data protection and records management. The other half was inquest work: attending coroner’s inquests, preparation of witness statements and so on.” The group advised NHS Cambridgeshire at the inquest into the death of David Gray, who died after a locum doctor from Germany working his first out-of-hours shift in Britain administered ten times the maximum recommended dose of diamorphine. There is also a highly regarded mental health team, while a regulatory team – an offshoot of the healthcare practice – has the General Dental Council as its main client.
The education sector also faces upheaval. M&R acts for universities and schools, working on projects (student accommodation developments, schools converting to academies), advising in sensitive matters (naughty students and teachers) and taking on litigation (discrimination cases). As you can imagine, it’s “all very interesting” and our source had done “quite a lot of know-how” work, updating team members on changes in the law.
Property work is a big deal. In East Anglia the firm acts for Aviva, Barratt Homes, the Imperial War Museum, Norwich City FC, UEA and several Cambridge colleges, while Birmingham has more NHS trust and borough council clients. The agriculture seat is also heavily property-based. A lot is simple conveyancing but there are also matters like “big wind farm projects” that entail more than simple land law.
“Any trainee would be lying if they said they hadn’t been tied to a photocopier at some point” but at Mills & Reeve it’s a rarity. Our sources were happy with the level of responsibility they had been given and especially praised the quality of the supervision provided, saying: “Even people who have been partners for 20 years are still willing to take you aside and go through things with you.” Two appraisals per seat keep feedback coming regularly.
Want the grand tour?
Spread out all over the country, and each with their own histories, the six Mills & Reeve offices are very different in personality. The managing partner is based in Brum, the senior partner in Norwich and trainees say there’s no real head office, so we’ll talk about them in no particular order.
The Birmingham branch is based on Colmore Row, the city’s main lawyer drag. Established in 1998 and initially concentrating on the health sector, it has since broadened its offering. “I would say that Birmingham is probably the most social office,” one source declared. “They have a younger group that likes to hang out a lot.” The bar of Indian restaurant Asha’s and the Old Joint Stock are favoured Friday venues. Uniquely among the offices, a flex-time system is in place.
The "friendly" Cambridge office is the largest. The building has three floors, of which only the top one is open-plan. Its temperamental heating system drew comments: “It veers from tropical to Arctic, so you have to come dressed for any weather!” Two doors down is The Flying Pig pub, which is always full of M&R and Eversheds lawyers on Friday nights.
The Norwich office is where it all began for the firm back in 1880. Perhaps for this reason, and due to its “many landed estate clients,” it is “quieter” and “slightly more traditional” in feel than the other offices. However, one source claimed Norwich is “best for work/life balance: it’s acceptable to leave at 5 or 5.30pm if your work for the day is done.” Even in other offices late nights are rare: a Cambridge source said “come 6pm the place is pretty deserted” and the latest we heard of any trainee working until was 10pm.
The London office opened in 2000. It has doubled in size in the last few years but still concentrates almost solely on insurance. “The people have been brought in from other London firms. There’s less of the ‘Mills & Reeve atmosphere’, but they are not City people trying to impose City ways of thinking upon us. They have come to us to get away from that.” This is another office with an active social life.
The newest additions to the firm, in Manchester and Leeds, now have insurance groups alongside the family groups they were founded with, and the Manchester office has just moved to a much larger building near Piccadilly Gardens. Trainees note “a completely different atmosphere” from Cambridge and Norwich. “It’s still early days for Manchester and Leeds” and “there’s still a bit of north-south divide.”
By taking seats up north, trainees are doubtless doing their bit towards more complete integration and, though extravagant firm-wide parties are a thing of the past, Mills & Reeve’s disparate offices come together in other ways. At the time of our calls staff were gearing up for the big annual football match: Birmingham and the North versus London and East Anglia. The Southern team is looking for revenge, having been “thrashed” in 2010.
Trouble at t’ Mills?
Who does M&R hire? Looking through the trainee profiles on its website will tell you that it recruits from a broad range of universities. The current crop of trainees include alumni of Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Durham, Essex, Nottingham, Nottingham Trent, Leeds, Leeds Met, Leicester, Oxford Brookes, Sheffield, UCL, UEA and others. About two-thirds of current M&R trainees are female, and in Norwich only one trainee in the last three year-groups has been a bloke. To some extent this reflects the proportion of guys and girls coming out of law school, but the fact is that boys tend to be poorer performers in the application and assessment process.
Mills & Reeve is instructed by enough public sector clients to be affected by the cuts that are starting to bite, and this is currently “a hot topic within the firm.” Trainees were refreshingly frank: “We get an update from the managing partner once a month on how the firm is doing. It makes for quite depressing reading at the moment.” Second-years professed themselves “nervous” about their qualification prospects and seemed resigned to the fact that many of them would be leaving. Unfortunately, they were correct, as only eight of 22 stayed on as NQs.
Still, with corporate, commercial and private client divisions, not to mention that booming insurance group, the firm has a very broad practice that should sustain it in the tough times still to come. Training partner Brian Marshall says that while certain aspects of work will diminish because of the cuts, there will still be public sector matters to attend to. “In the education sector, universities are not getting as much funding, and so they are looking for more commercial opportunities,” he said. “They can be as acquisitive and aggressive as any corporate. Most universities have a strategy to get them global domination very quickly. That trend is likely to increase. On the health side, there is plenty to do in terms of positioning organisations for the new environment.”
And finally...
This jolly nice firm is an obvious choice in East Anglia and a very strong option in Birmingham.