‘In the event of a recession, the lawyers will be fine. They always are. Unless you work at Ince.’
Reflecting now on this remark made by a senior contact last August, it is clear that the writing has been on the wall for Ince for quite some time and that its parent company, Ince Group, going into administration was probably the only realistic outcome of this sorry saga.
If we were looking for silver linings though, the demise of Ince could be viewed as a useful lesson in what not to do when running a law firm, especially as LB gears up for a substantive analysis on governance as part of our annual ESG report.
‘This is not simply a case of poor financial management – such disastrous mismanagement invariably results in human collateral damage.’
This is not simply a case of poor financial management – such disastrous mismanagement invariably results in human collateral damage. Speaking to former partners recently at the once-venerable shipping firm, emotions, especially anger, sadness and frustration, were running extremely high, telling of the personal devastation wrought.
The only surprise with Ince is that it didn’t collapse sooner. Good financial hygiene, the lynchpin of any good business, has been patently lacking at Ince for some time, to which the embarrassing delays to its audit bear testament. That the listed group had not made known its financial performance to shareholders since December 2021 is a deafening alarm bell, as was the desperate rummaging behind the sofa cushions for loose change last year when the firm hastily divested its Gibraltar business and washed its hands of Arden Partners, the corporate advisory business it acquired less than a year before, at a significant loss. Transparency, another prerequisite of a healthy business model, has been utterly lacking, dating back at least to a dearth of communication and what many claim to have been underhanded timing of the prepack rescue deal with Gordon Dadds that was pushed through at the end of 2018, apparently irrespective of buy-in from the partnership.
The details behind the ousting last year of chief executive Adrian Biles, who many former partners describe as a fractious personality, can only be guessed at. But reading between the lines of the darkly ominous RNS announcement at the time, that he had ‘been removed as a director of the company with immediate effect, as a result of circumstances which may give rise to a conflict of interest between Adrian Biles and the company’, it was probably just as unedifying as the series of unfortunate events that preceded it.
Quite why Biles has been industriously registering Ince-related business names with Companies House is still something of an enigma. Whatever the reason, the plot thickens and the mind boggles.
Now all eyes will be on how the administration plays out, and what any potential third-party buyer might look like.
Stay tuned for our analysis of law firm governance in the next issue, but in the meantime, it is safe to use a list of the things that Ince’s management has done as a playbook for how not to run your law firm.