Our Approach
We are a specialist business law firm that only accepts work in areas within our expertise. We also have a small selection of trusted partners with whom we work closely on ancillary specialist areas of commercial law and established links with specialist private client lawyers, accountants and financial advisers.
Our approach to clients is very much a long-term approach where we want to build a lasting relationship with the businesses we work alongside. We will take time to find out about you, your business and your goals in our first consultation with you. Only if we think we are the right firm for your business will we suggest engagement terms.
Your Other Advisers
For our business owner clients, we work alongside your existing advisers to ensure that our advice dovetails with theirs. This means that your Shareholders’ Agreement and business succession planning links with your wills, tax and pension advice. We work alongside you and your business throughout its lifetime from its incorporation and through its growth until its eventual sale.
Our Fee Structure
As we only work within areas of law where we are very experienced, it is usually possible to offer you a fixed fee structure for any commercial transaction, often broken down into the various transaction stages. Other than in cases of urgent insolvency work (where it may be necessary to be engaged immediately) our first consultation is usually without charge.
Our Remote Consultations and Working Arrangements
Although we have two North Wales offices, our operating systems enable our team members to work remotely so we are able to function as normal during periods of lockdown. We operate Zoom and Microsoft Teams meetings with clients to work safely within social distancing guidelines.
Our Clients
We are very proud of the quality of our extensive client base, which is unusual for a firm of our size. We consider that this is due to our approach to limiting our work to fields of law where we are experts and to the focused but flexible approach we take towards meeting our clients’ needs and expectations.
We work closely with some of the largest accountancy firms in North Wales (including Azets Chartered Accountants and Business Advisory Services) and are often called in by them to work alongside them when their clients encounter financial difficulty or need advice on a commercial transaction.
We also works alongside other law firms, providing them with a “bolt-on” insolvency department and enabling them to continue to service their clients’ other legal needs, with us dealing purely with the insolvency-specific queries. We respect the existing solicitor/client relationship and only take on the work where we are specifically invited to assist.
Our overriding aim is that our clients will be satisfied, not just with our initial advice but also the eventual outcome. We pride ourselves on the fact that we do not over-promise and under-deliver! The fact that our business is built on repeat referral work from our professional referrers (accountants and solicitors) is proof that our work is of the highest quality and our clients are happy with our service. We would be pleased to provide direct references to prospective clients and/or other legal and accountancy practices thinking of using our services or arrange for you to discuss our work with key clients and/or work referrers.
Our first client meeting is usually free and can be done by Zoom or Microsoft Teams and we generally like to include the client’s other advisers wherever possible so that we can establish the full picture at an early stage.
We do not charge or pay referral fees for work: our business has been built on personal recommendations.
Although she is fully qualified as a Licensed Insolvency Practitioner, Andrea Knox does not take insolvency appointments (i.e. she chooses not to act as a Liquidator/Administrator etc.), preferring to concentrate on the Solicitor side of her qualifications. This gives us a unique selling point in that there is absolutely no incentive whatsoever for us to recommend an insolvency appointment to a client: wherever possible we try and keep businesses going outside an insolvency process and use the host of restructuring tools available, including those introduced in response to Covid-19 by the Corporate Insolvency and Governance Bill 2019-21.
We also work closely with our referrers and their clients in the early stages of a business experiencing difficulty. This course ensures that a client wishing to inject further capital to support a business does so in the best way, ideally so that he is protected in the event of an eventual insolvency, when they will not lose personal assets (e.g. a house) in the event that the business eventually fails.
We also have a wide range of businesses for whom we work directly. These range from an international sports regulatory body to local small companies, partnerships and sole traders. We tailor our services to match the needs of each individual client. Again, we would be very happy to obtain direct references on request to provide prospective clients with the assurance of the quality of our services.
Transaction wise, our usual transactions range from the tens of thousands of pounds to c. £7.5 million business sales and acquisitions.