Unlike Drink and Groceries, the ‘Law’ is not a defensive stock which investors traditionally retreat to in a down turn. “The recovery followed drastic action: DWF replaced chief executive Andrew Leaitherland and announced job cuts and the closure or scaling back of operations in Cologne, Dubai, Singapore and Brussels.”Īs a sector, trading in legal services firms is still – in stock exchange terms – relatively new. Since then, DWF Group shares have begun to climb but remain well below their 2020 peak, at 87.5p at the time of writing. Shares continued to fall over the next two months, reaching a record low of 53p in early July. At DWF, which floated on the main market in 2019, shares were riding at a record high in February 2020 before losing over a third of their value in a month. To date, only a handful of law firms are publicly traded in the UK, which might seem counter intuitive to those with professional expertise in Corporate and Commercial law.Īs reported in the Law Gazette, “Almost all the law firms listed in London took a hit in the early stages of the pandemic. Gateley was the first UK law firm in 2015 to float on the London Stock Exchange. Now introducing shareholders to this mix complicates things, because in a typical corporate setting, shareholders (owners) have more legal rights than customers (clients) for example, a widely accepted purpose of a corporation is to increase shareholder value.” Although it sounds like a made-up claim, there is a genuine concern underneath because lawyers typically have duty of loyalty to their clients. Jason Lee, an Attorney practicing in the US writes, “Essentially, lawyers don’t want investors/business people to influence key decisions within law firms, and by extension, the profession. As explained here the main legal hurdle is the American Bar Association Ethics rule 5.4, which prohibits sharing of legal fees with non-lawyers, and prohibition of lawyers from forming law firms with non-lawyers. In the United States, law firms are not permitted to be publicly floated. The first-ever law firm flotation occurred in 2007 when Slater and Gordon made history by going public in Australia. The company is clearly foremost in the technology space but what of law firms listed on the stock exchange? The private-equity-backed company helps users generate legal documents without lawyers in a range of areas such as estate planning, divorce, name change and residential leases.Īs might be expected Legal Zoom’s largest market is in the US but even in the UK it has over 750,000 customers according to CityAM. It was hard not to be impressed when LegalZoom’s shares opened 31 per cent above the company’s offer price on its Nasdaq debut earlier this month, valuing the online legal services company at $7bn (£5bn).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |