Blowing our own trumpet

Some readers may possibly be under the impression that, because I write this blog as a personal project, I am just a one-man band, but I am in fact just one member of Keystone Law’s Planning Law Team, an integral part of our Commercial Property department. Keystone Law is a full-service commercial law firm, with its main office in London but practising throughout the whole of England and Wales. It currently has 142 senior lawyers and is continuing to expand at a rate of approximately 30 lawyers per annum, so there is every prospect that we shall have 200 lawyers in the firm by the end of 2015. Our client base is predominantly made up of private companies, although we also offer some private client services, and quite a few of our planning clients are individuals or small businesses.

There is a saying that if you don’t blow your own trumpet no-one else will blow it for you, so I make no excuse for passing on news of our firm’s further expansion. On 21st October 2013, Keystone became an Alternative Business Structure (“ABS”), a new law firm model regulated by the UK’s Solicitors’ Regulation Authority. The ABS is a more flexible corporate structure.

The firm began its international roll-out in July 2013 with the establishment of its off-shore office in Guernsey. Three additional jurisdictions are currently in the pipeline. Keystone Law is now launching its Australian practice, and aims to attract an initial team of 25 senior solicitors in that country before client work commences in March 2014. Thereafter Keystone expects to recruit an additional 50 solicitors in Australia. The head office will be in Sydney, from where Keystone’s legal practice will cover the whole of Australia. I can’t say yet whether our Australian operation will include planning law, but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t.

Despite Keystone Law’s increasing size and stature in the provision of legal services, we pride ourselves on personal service, and will continue to maintain the same high standard of client care for which we have a well-deserved reputation. Keystone has won a plethora of legal and business awards during the past 10 years, most recently a Law Society Award for Excellence which it received on 22nd October 2013.

Our central admin team have recently taken a lease of another floor of the building they occupy in central London, thus providing a much-needed doubling of the accommodation for our back office operation, and on 1st November we shall be moving our Bristol office into smart new premises in the city centre – another welcome development.

That’s the end of the commercial break. This blog was never intended to be a marketing exercise. It has admittedly generated a great deal of planning work for us (and I am fond of referring to this as “marketing by mistake”), but it really is written only for fun, and I am hoping that I may be able to post items here more regularly in future than I have managed in the recent past. The readership seems to have settled down at around 30,000 page views a month, and so my aim will be to maintain the interest of these readers in the months and years to come.

© MARTIN H GOODALL