Redundancy consultations continue to dog the City’s top 100 firms as Bond Dickinson and Watson, Farley & Williams last month became the latest to reveal they have placed a number of support roles under review.
In August, Bond Dickinson began a consultation process that will see up to 7% of its support staff made redundant. The newly-merged 700-lawyer firm – a combination of Newcastle-based Dickinson Dees and Bristol-headquartered Bond Pearce that went live on 1 May – said it intends to ‘discuss a proposal to review the support teams and how they should be shaped to best support the needs of Bond Dickinson’.
It added that ‘the proposals, if accepted, would see approximately 7% of support staff roles being made redundant and voluntary redundancy enhancements have been offered to all affected staff’.
Managing partner Jonathan Blair said: ‘Following the merger we have identified some new roles within the business but also inevitably some areas of duplication. We are consulting with those affected and our main priority is to focus on supporting them.’
The news came less than a week after 339-lawyer Watson Farley confirmed to Legal Business that it would review its secretarial support function in its London office.
A spokesperson for the firm said: ‘Secretaries in Watson Farley’s London office were recently advised that a review of our secretarial support function will be taking place over the next five weeks, following which the team may be restructured if required. This aims to ensure that we have highly skilled and specialised roles that meet the needs of our fee-earners.’
The firm would not comment further on the review or confirm the number of roles that may be affected.
Watson Farley this year broke through the £100m revenue barrier, announcing an increase of 2% to £102.1m compared to last year’s £99.9m. However, this increase is below average when compared with its revenue growth of 73% over the past five years. Profit per equity partner has also dropped by 14% to £384,000 from £446,000in 2012.
The firm said the rise in revenue and drop in profit was due to a period of heavy investment, including its Hong Kong launch in March 2012 followed by an opening in Frankfurt in January 2013, as well as the six lateral partner hires the firm made last year.
Both firms join a long list of City and national practices to conduct redundancy reviews. The end of July saw DWF announce 38 staff redundancies and Hill Dickinson shed 83 staff, including 14 partners and 69 employees, while Taylor Wessing concluded a review under which 22 secretaries lost their jobs.