Boutique firms CM Murray, Hierons and Maurice Turnor Gardner have joined forces with chartered accountants Buzzacott to go to market as a one-stop-shop for professional practices.
Collectively dubbed the Professional Practices Alliance, the firms aim to pool their resources in a bid to capture the lion’s share of advisory work to professional services firms. In particular they will be looking to advise US firms planning to set up in London.
Maurice Turnor Gardner partner Richard Turnor said the alliance members’ practices are complementary as his firm focuses on advising firms on their own M&A. CM Murray specialises in the employment and contentious side of partnership law and Hierons is a corporate boutique. He added that there would be scope to expand the alliance further to complete the offering.
“There are particular things that a US firm would require if coming to the UK so we may align with a bank or insurance broker,” he added. “We’ll see how it goes then see about building relationships.”
Although the firms will pitch for work together they will each bill separately and clients will receive separate engagement letters.
“When it comes to acting for clients we plan to have joint training sessions to make sure we’re all informed,” said Turnor. “We’ll each major on our particular skill-set and make it available where the clients want it.”
The concept of offering clients a multi-disciplinary service is also being explored by the Big Four accountancy firms, which with the exception of Deloitte have begun pitching for work collectively across their accountancy and legal arms (9 June 2014). Deloitte is currently drawing up plans for its own entry into the UK legal services sector (9 June 2014).
