Solicitors sans frontiers

Generally speaking, the cases our clients bring to us may be understood and advised on with a thorough understanding of English law. But over the past few years, we have come to realise that restricting our operations to the UK's legal framework places restrictions on the services we can provide to our clients.

While we advise on everything from property to HR, we used to stop short of being able to give counsel on matters that involve an understanding of the law of another country – for example, advising clients who were looking to expand their operations with exports or imports. We just didn’t have the knowledge inhouse.

And that knowledge base was deficient in many areas than just corporate and commercial law. We had private clients who had purchased holiday homes or real estate abroad and we needed to be informed of the various rules governing these purchases and ownerships. We also had clients who had foreign spouses and wanted to create a trust or will that would be recognised abroad.

As a firm that places a high value on providing excellent customer service, we saw that our services needed to be improved in this area and set out to create a more comprehensive offering for our clients.

The good news was that we already had the tools to build a global network at our disposal, we just hadn’t fully utilised it.

Building a global network

Through our long-standing membership of LawNet, we have been a member of Eurojuris - yet we had never been particularly active in the group. For those who aren’t familiar with it, Eurojuris is a network of member firms which includes 600 lawyers in 200 countries worldwide.

Eurojuris members provide legal advice to businesses and personal clients across a range of sectors in their native country. Each firm is independent, well-established and trusted in their community and before joining Eurojuris, they are vetted to ensure they deliver proactive and knowledgeable advice and guidance to clients.

When I joined FBC Manby Bowdler, I reassessed our membership in Eurojuris and decided that in order to get the most out of it, we needed to use it more strategically to help us establish that global vision that was missing from our portfolio and that would help expand our business. Time had to be invested by everyone at the company, but it was well worth it.

Eurojuris members meet every six months and from a networking point of view, the annual conference is a must-attend for us. We send a team of five or six colleagues to the conference – which is usually held somewhere in Europe; this year it’s Rome. Our team is rotated so several of our legal professionals get the opportunity to build their own network. Eurojuris also operates a professional and social network for lawyers under 40, which we’ve starting to encourage our younger colleagues to attend to develop their connections earlier in their career.

We do have WhatsApp groups and LinkedIn to keep in touch with our opposite numbers at member firms during the year, but there is no substitute for face-to-face time. In fact, the links we’ve built with other member firms have only got stronger the more effort we have invested in them.