Birmingham’s legal market remains a contradiction. It has been obvious for some time that high-end transactional work is drifting away, yet new entrants flock to the city’s bulging mid-tier. Likewise, Birmingham’s top legal players have for years made bold and escalating claims about the amount of work they source outside the region, yet the evidence of this national assault is arguably less clear than the mid late 1990s when Wragge & Co was in its full transactional pomp.
With some firms now claiming to source as much as 80% of their work outside the Midlands, a cynic might wonder how long this gravity-defying expansion can continue; on current trends Birmingham’s top firms will be sourcing 120% of their work outside the UK’s second city by 2017.
