Howard Kennedy: mind the lack of gaps

The Lawyer was surely not the only inquisitive character baffled by Howard Kennedy’s decision to put an embargo on news that its merger with Finers Stephens Innocent, widely publicised to be going ahead on 1 February, had indeed gone live today.

Perhaps the firm was trying to ensure a dazzling launch of its new and exciting branding, which sees the combined firm dubbed HowardKennedyFsi. Even more enticingly, it’s made full use of the vertical lines in the ‘d’ and the ‘K’ of HowardKennedy to merge the two letters into one. Nice work.

The partners might have thought that what the firm lacked in spacebars it made up for in revenues, but it’s not quite as it once seemed. Howard Kennedy has adjusted its official line on the size of the merger from £43m when it first announced the deal (we estimated the round-ish £45m) to £39m today.

It’s not entirely clear which side of the merger has had to adjust its revenue figure, although given that Finers was an LLP and was thus required to announce financials it had little room to budge. The merged outfit will be an LLP, which brings Howard Kennedy into unchartered territory in terms of having to declare its income figure, which it first did voluntarily in 2011 .

There’s one hitch though: on Companies House HowardKennedyFsi has filed its name as Howard Kennedy FSI LLP, with an incredible number of spaces between words. Branding only goes so far, it seems.

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