BY:
Alexis de Hahn
Avocat Reporteur
PROJECT COUNSEL MEDIA
4 August 2020 (Paris, France) – The news that CMS is to close its Mayfair office after five years probably comes as little surprise in the era of coronavirus. It comes hot on the heels of Fieldfisher shutting its 1 Mayfair Place base, and is a logical reaction to an age when prime real estate is even more of a luxury than before.
CMS and Fieldfisher both have larger offices in the Square Mile to fall back on, but what of the firms that have their headquarters in Mayfair and surrounds? The slow trickle of law firms leaving the West End has been happening for some time, but there have been further developments in the last couple of years that suggest the end is nigh for W1 and its equally prestigious neighbour SW1 as legal hotspots.
Last year, media firm Harbottle & Lewis upped sticks from Hanover Square to take up residence on the Strand. And only last month the Parliamentary gurus of BDB Pitmans – formerly known as Bircham Dyson Bell – left Broadway (SW1H) for One Bartholomew Close (EC1A). Finers Stephens Innocent (W1W) merged in 2012; Davenport Lyons (W1S) entered administration two years later.
These departures leave precious few firms of note left in the area.
West End firms are have been migrating east for decades and two more have departed since 2019
Who’s left? Of the UK top 100, Forsters is about the last firm standing. It is joined by U.S. firm Brown Rudnick (for U.S. law firms, expense is no object), and media boutique Sheridans. After that, just a smattering of private client firms with names like Discreet Law LLP, plus shop-fronts of firms you never knew had a London office (does Mundays, which is having a turbulent time in its home region of South East England, really need a W1 postcode?).
Even Boodle Hatfield – the firm that was literally behind the development of most of Mayfair in the 1700s – has gone. The firm maintains a W1K postcode but in reality the majority of its lawyers have been working in a nice office on the South Bank since 2014. That move saw the firm’s London real estate costs drop from £99 per sq ft – the highest of any firm in the UK200 – to just £56.54 per sq ft.
And that is the nub of the matter. Forsters pays around £79.50 per square foot for its 46,000 sq ft of space. It probably has no desire to leave its elegant Georgian townhouse. But the only real need for a Mayfair office is to impress a certain type of client, and for the sake of tradition. And now since coronavirus has made Zoom workers of (almost) all of us, those arguments get ropier by the day.
And as we noted in a recent post, surveys by The Lawyer and LegalBusiness UK both show that most firms are planning to have a work staff split 50/50 … remote/on-site … for the foreseeable future.
