Why becoming an LLP is just the start for Scotland's largest high-street law firm

Peter Ranscombe gets geeky over corporate structures with managing partner Jacqueline Law and asks what’s next for her and Aberdein Considine.

You never forget your first time. Twenty years ago, as a wet-behind-the-ears junior reporter working on the ‘Law & Legal Affairs’ pages in The Scotsman newspaper, many of my first stories were about law firms converting from traditional partnerships into those far more exotic-sounding ‘limited liability partnerships’, or LLPs.

Fast forward two decades and the announcement over the summer that Aberdein Considine had transformed into an LLP left me scratching my head – wasn’t it an LLP already? And if not, then why make the move now?

“I’d like to think we’re on the curve or ahead of the curve in many ways, but on this we’ve probably been behind the curve,” smiles Jacqueline Law, Aberdein Considine’s managing partner since 2014. “I believe we were the largest traditional partnership left in Scotland.

“It’s been an evolving journey since I took over as managing partner just over a decade ago. For the past 10 years, we’ve grown our geographic footprint and service lines, and now we’ve done some internal housekeeping.”

Aberdein Considine is unrecognisable from the firm Law joined in 1993 as a trainee, fresh from her bachelor of laws degree and diploma of legal practice at the University of Aberdeen. “When I joined the partnership, I was only the seventh equity partner,” she remembers.

The firm was founded in Aberdeen in 1981 by Harvey Aberdein and Iain Considine. Aberdein handed over the managing partner’s reins to Law in 2014, with Considine stepping down as a senior partner in 2018, when his daughter, Laura, took over the running of the firm’s Stonehaven office.

Expansion into Central Belt and then England

Initially best known as a traditional solicitor estate agent, the firm expanded into wealth management around 20 years ago, before accelerating its geographic and sectoral growth with a push into first the Central Belt and then the north of England. As well as opening offices, a string of acquisitions followed, including Stirling’s Muirhead Buchanan in 2014, Glasgow’s A&S Ireland in 2016, and Edinburgh’s Russel & Aitken in 2022.

South of the border, Aberdein Considine took over Newcastle’s Wallers Solicitors – previously part of Hay & Kilner – in 2016. Now, the company has 21 offices and more than 450 members of staff, covering in excess of 70 specialisms, from corporate and employment through to dispute resolution and family law.

Documents filed at Companies House showed the firm incorporated its LLP in October 2019 and a separate limited company for its wealth management division in January 2022. The Covid-19 pandemic interrupted its restructuring plans, but the corporate housekeeping remained high on Law’s agenda.

The business completed the transition over the summer, with Aberdein Considine Wealth spun out as a separate entity. The LLP owns all of the preference and A-class shares in the new vehicle, with the wealth manager’s senior management holding C-class shares and the team who helped grow the division – including Law – retaining B-class shares, giving the company a range of options for paying dividends.

Was there pressure from the Financial Conduct Authority to make the changes? “There wasn’t – it was very much an internal decision by us,” explains Law. “The C-shares are the pot that will help us to incentivise shareholders and reward the talent we recruit.”

Increased credibility and transparency

Attracting talented staff is also high on the agenda for the law firm. “One of the challenges we face as a profession is recruitment, especially for firms such as ours that straddle that line between being medium sized or large,” says Law.

“LLP accounts are fully audited and available from Companies House, which gives them more credibility than traditional partnership accounts when potential recruits are doing their own due diligence on our firm by allowing them to see our balance sheet. Being an LLP and making those accounts publicly available also gives more transparency for our clients, and when we’re tendering for contracts.”

As the name suggests, being an LLP also limits each partner’s – or, technically, ‘member’s’ – personal liability, which again can be more attractive than a traditional partnership. While LLP members replicate the position of equity partners – with financial skin in the game – Law doesn’t rule out creating other non-equity partner positions further down the line if needed.

For now, Law is focused on bedding in the firm’s new brand, which was also introduced over the summer – the first tweak of its logo and other branding since the business was founded – with the opening of a Manchester office back in January and the relocation of its 70-strong Newcastle team in July.

This month, the firm takes over another floor at Blenheim House in Aberdeen’s famous Queen’s Cross area, boosting the number of people at its head office to around 130. Despite marking more than a decade at the helm, Law shows no sign of slowing down. “My partners will tell you that I don’t really pause to reflect and celebrate our achievements – I’m more about what’s next,” she laughs.

From LLP to RLS and ABS

What’s next includes the fallout from the Regulation of Legal Services (Scotland) Act (RLS), which received royal assent in June. While converting to an LLP won’t affect how Aberdein Considine rewards its consultants, directors and other non-legal staff in the short term, the new act could be transformative.

“Over the past 15 or 20 years, we’ve gone from a situation where lawyers were going to need to retain a 51% majority stake, to talk of 90% ownership, and all of a sudden everything’s gone and its 0%,” Law muses. “We’re all now waiting for guidance because that’s enormous for the profession.

“RLS is huge for a business like ours that has multiple service lines, including key non-lawyers working in senior roles, who sit on our operations board and are akin to partners. In the future, they may now play an ownership role in the business, which has been precluded to us previously.”

Thinking back to those early days on The Scotsman, the other three-letter acronym alongside LLP in my working life was “ABS” – alternative business structures. It’s taken 20 years, but now law firms will finally need to get to grips with those three letters too.