Herbies gets £500,000 from Invest NI to create further 61 jobs
Herbert Smith has announced it will create a further 61 jobs in its newly opened Belfast office over the next five years, after receiving additional public funding of more than £500,000 from Invest Northern Ireland.
The announcement comes as Herbert Smith officially opens its Belfast office, where it already employs 26 full-time employees including 19 fee-earners.
The firm said that client demand for the Belfast office has led it to recruit a further 12 fee-earners, who will join in the coming months, and it has now confirmed that it will add a further 49 Belfast jobs over the next five years.
Invest Northern Ireland has now offered a total of £734,000 of support towards the creation of jobs in the office. The positions are expected to generate £3.1m annually in salaries and benefits in Northern Ireland by 2016.
In addition, Herbert Smith is contemplating adding another 51 roles in the Belfast office, subject to demand, which would also be part of a five-year plan and would increase the annual salaries and benefits in Northern Ireland to £4.7m.
The new office, led by a management team comprising office director Libby Jackson, legal quality manager Lisa McLaughlin and operations manager Aiya Boranbayeva, is focusing on large scale document-intensive aspects of litigation, arbitration and regulatory investigations.
One of Herbert Smith’s prime considerations in choosing Belfast was Northern Ireland’s pool of high-quality graduates and professionals combined with a significantly lower cost base compared with London and other offices.
The vast majority of the team is made up of people hired from the local market or qualified lawyers from Northern Ireland who have trained in England and returned home to Belfast.
Jackson commented: “Opening an office in Belfast has been a great experience for the firm. We’re particularly pleased with the very talented team of high-quality lawyers and law graduates we’ve recruited.
“Our decision to expand the team further so quickly is due to high demand and the extremely positive response from our clients to the excellence of the legal work being done in Belfast.
“As a firm, we’re enjoying being part of Northern Ireland’s legal community and have every confidence in the future growth of our operation here. We’re also grateful to Invest Northern Ireland, whose support has been, and continues to be, much appreciated.”
Invest Northern Ireland has also given £2.5m in support to magic circle firm Allen & Overy, which announced in February it would launch a business and legal support centre in Belfast, creating 300 new jobs (4 February 2011).
Readers' comments (2)
IHateBPP | 1-Jul-2011 1:23 pm
I'm not a mathematical sort of person but the sausage factory is currently producing, supposedly, £3.1mm in salary and benefits for NI.
If the salary was roughly double or triple what is being paid in NI when the jobs were in London that equates to a loss for the overall UK economy. A loss which was funded by taxpayers' money.
That is a loss even if the supposed NI dole queue reductions are taken into account although my understanding is most people left other firms or jobs for HS and just weren't replaced by those firms. Further, we shouldn't forget that the new jobs will inevitably be created at a loss to existing jobs in London.
It's also an insult to view NI as offering nothing more than pairs of hands to staff these sausage factories as my experience has been that NI graduates tend to outperform the vast majority of their peers on the mainland. It's just a shame that so many NI graduates choose to remain in NI spending years in dead ends like this rather than looking for well paid training contracts in England. While these firms might be "mulling" the option of offering Institute or LPC training contracts, those firms will be mulling that from now to doomsday as it makes a nice carrot to dangle from a stick.
Invest NI is basically just firing money at law firms to take advantage of NI's stagnant economy and keeping desperate graduates in NI on an unfair claim that these sausage factories will lead anywhere other than up the garden path. These are the same firms who will leave NI to open cheap sausage factories in Manila/Mumbai/Iraq/Iran or wherever the second these sausage factories take off and there arises the possibility of wages increasing above minimum wage.
I lived in a provincial town/hamlet in NI and east Belfast, right in the middle of where the recent riots happened, for years working in poorly paid jobs before using the experience I'd gained and moved to London, leaving NI behind for good. If the people in these sausage factories aren't given serious consideration to doing the same then they should be but unfortunately most will continue to be strung along by HS and the like with their false claims of offering all things to all men.
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Vince Cable Guy | 1-Jul-2011 3:04 pm
Dear IHateBPP,
I think you are talking some sense but one solution to the loss of jobs in London is to boot out all the Aussi's and Kiwi's who take all the lawyer, paralegal, HR and BD positions. If they are too rubbish to get a job in their own country, why should they be allowed to work here? I am sick and tired of working with Aussi and NZ "lawyers" who haven't even bothered to do the QLT, yet get legal positions and are learning on the job. It makes a mockery of our legal system.
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