Jaggards is no more
Well-known defendant costs firm Jaggards has stopped trading after it merged with its associated solicitors’ firm, Taylor Rose Law, and also with London law firm Tucker Turner Kinsgley Wood. The new practice, Taylor Rose TTKW, is an alternative business structure comprising 16 partners, around 300 employees and seven offices across England.
The licence allows Michael Webb OBE, who has been a non-executive director of Jaggards, to continue the role in the new holding company board.
The firm said it also wanted to lay the foundations for possible external investment in the future, although at this stage no steps have been taken towards achieving that.
Taylor Rose Law was originally founded in 2004 as McCullough & Co, a specialist defendant legal costs firm. In 2009 the firm took on its current name and status, and began moving into other areas of law and growing in scale, also creating its own online legal document service last year.
Irwin Mitchell rolls out fixed fees
National law firm Irwin Mitchell has launched a staged fixed-fee scheme for commercial litigation, which it said was different from other firms’ offers because barrister and experts fees can also be included in the fixed cost fee.
It said: “The firm believes it is one of the few law firms to offer such a product, and sees this as a logical extension of the conditional fee agreements, litigation funding and project fixed fees already offered in the market.
“This new fixed fee product is a response to the rising costs of litigation, typified by the recent staggering increase in court fees (which the Lord Chancellor Michael Gove indicated may well increase further) and the uncertainty surrounding the costs of obtaining expert legal advice, created by the outdated and expensive hourly rate and the estimate model upon which many law firms conduct business.”
Irwin Mitchell said that after obtaining preliminary information from a new client, it will analyse the likely legal fees to be incurred and then, “in conjunction with expert law costs draftsmen”, prepare a proposed fixed fee for each stage of the litigation process.