Following a round of redundancies last year which saw 33 roles cut, Ince & Co is restructuring its partnership and support staff with six partners and ten secretarial staff set to depart.
Three partners have already left the firm following a partnership vote that unanimously agreed to the restructure. Another three partners will also exit over the next month, with the total six departing from the firm’s shipping, insurance, aviation and energy practice areas.
The secretarial services team restructure resulted in ten secretarial staff opting for redundancy packages. This restructure formed part of the firm’s ‘Business Services Change Programme’.
Ince senior partner Jan Heuvels, who has been leading the firm since January 2015, said: ‘The overriding objective of this programme is to improve the service delivered to partners, other fee earners and ultimately our clients.’
The new structure sees the creation of two new teams, and new senior and team personal assistant roles, which replace the firm’s existing legal secretarial roles. These new positions will provide all fee earners with one central point of contact for all secretarial needs.
In terms of the new teams, a new document production team has been formed with operators to focus on the production of documents and transcription; and a new team of administration assistants has also been created for basic administration such as filing, copying and scanning.
‘We were able to fill a significant proportion of the new roles from our existing secretarial staff, but the changes regrettably resulted in 10 redundancies,’ added Heuvels. ‘We are now in the process of recruiting for six new roles.’
The firm confirmed it has concluded the restructure of its partnership and its secretarial services team, and that no other fee earners will be affected by the restructure.
In August last year, the firm’s global revenues fell to £86.7m in the 2013/14 financial year from £93.2m in the 2012/13 LB100. Against the firm’s latest audited figures, this worked out to be a drop of 5% from £91.7m.
jaishree.kalia@legalease.co.uk
