CBRE’s new, market defining ‘Law in the Regions’ report provides a comprehensive overview of the Legal sector in the UK regions, providing both real estate strategy insight gained from a series of in-depth interviews with some of the country’s top law firms as well as results of a sector benchmarking exercise, revealing key indicators such as top 30 law firm locations, top cities by number of fee earners, average area and rent per fee earner.
Headline findings reveal a simple ranking of UK regional legal cities, measured by the total office floor-space in each city occupied by law firms in the UK Top 100 (as identified by trade magazine ‘Legal Business’). This analysis shows a two-tiered hierarchy of leading regional cities for law firm occupation. The top tier of Bristol, Birmingham and Manchester, each have well over 750,000 sq ft of office space occupied by law firms, well ahead of the second tier cities of Edinburgh, Leeds, Liverpool and Glasgow, with volumes in the 300-500,000 sq ft range.
Southampton, although not one of the top tier stand-out cities nationally – does stand out as the largest destination for legal services anywhere in the South of England (excluding London) with a total 174,560 sq ft of office space occupied by law firms in the UK Top 100. It is also ranked the highest city in the South for the total number of fee earners and is the 8th largest city nationally, in terms of its number of legal offices, placing it on a par with Newcastle and Cardiff.
James Brounger, Managing Director, CBRE Southampton said: “For many years Southampton has had a high number of law firms located in the City. Many are part of large regional practices, often with a London presence but headquartered in the South.
“Our latest research shows the increasing popularity of the South Coast as a destination for professional services firms, but the percentage of legal firms in occupational terms is by the far the greatest. Whilst considerably smaller in population size, Southampton has a proportionally larger legal representation than a number of other UK cities.”
Emma Jackson, Associate Director in CBRE Research, comments: “Key to our findings is that one size does not fit all when it comes to real estate strategy. Different business models and location starting points will require different real estate strategies. One thing is certain however, law firms are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their approach to real estate strategy, and as a result we are seeing a huge variety of different space requirements in UK regional cities and indeed a significant variation in the average area per fee earner.”
