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Martin Searle Solicitors

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Celebrating 15 Years in Business

SEN Solicitors, Community Care lawyers and employment law solicitors based in Brighton

Cate and I, as founding directors of Martin Searle Solicitors, are proud to look back on our 15 years in business. There were difficult challenges along the way, the most serious being the cuts to legal aid funding which resulted in us giving up our legal aid contract and completely changing the areas of law we practiced in and our business strategy.

We moved away from being Housing Law specialists in order to develop our Community Care Law work, alongside our Employment Law department and we stopped doing legal aid work.

To ensure that we prioritised our overriding values that justice should be accessible to all, we came up with an all-encompassing Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) strategy. This meant that despite only undertaking privately funded work, we have been able to provide over £100,000 year-on-year of free legal training and advice to clients through charities such as Community Works, Alzheimer’s Society Brighton & Hove, Age UK, Brighton & Hove CAB, Mind, ESRA and many more.

At the time we made this fundamental change, we did not even know if our business would survive but it was important for us to run a law firm that fitted with our personal ethics and values.

We are very pleased to be where we are now.

We thought you might like to hear some useful business lessons that we have learnt along the way. Here are our top 6:

  1. Lead by example
  2. Provide an excellent service where the client comes first
  3. Prioritise the work which pays well to enable your business to carry out work for the less well off for free or by offering discounts
  4. Recruit people who have similar ethics and values to your business – otherwise they won’t stay.
  5. Train, support and delegate and trust that your employee will do the job in hand
  6. “Cash is king” – borrow for big projects and ensure good cash flow at all times

All of us at Martin Searle Solicitors take great pride in “making a difference” to our clients. We are also pleased to be part of Brighton and Hove’s wonderful business community and hope to continue to provide specialist legal services in Employment and Community Care law for many years to come.

Thank you for all of your support.

Martin Searle Solicitors, 9 Marlborough Place, Brighton, BN1 1UB
T: 01273 609 991 info@ms-solicitors.co.uk

Martin Searle Solicitors is the trading name of ms solicitors ltd, which is authorised and regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority, and is registered in England under company number 05067303.

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