Set up in 1987, Merseyside-based Michael W Halsall Solicitor (Halsalls) originally specialised in road traffic accidents (RTA) and acted for many of the UK’s major insurance companies.
At its height, it was one of the biggest firms in the RTA sector, employing over 175 people dealing exclusively with RTA claims.
About seven years ago and with all the changes facing the personal injury Sector, Halsalls started to diversify its business and First4Lawyers played a significant role in helping Halsalls achieve that.
The firm joined the First4Lawyers panel four years ago in October 2010.
“Our joining was a strategic move, to help us achieve our primary objectives of expanding the firm, and diversifying in order to take us into new areas of work such as accidents at work, and slips and trips,” says Andrew Simcott, head of business development at Halsalls.
“It was a leap of faith, as they were still quite new to the sector at the time. We chose to work with them as they had quickly built up a good reputation in the market, and we had good recommendations from people whom we knew,” says Andrew.
The immediate impact on the firm was a significant increase in the amount of new types of personal injury (PI) work that we handled. So much so, in fact, that Halsalls has become one of First4Lawyers’ biggest users of its services.
“Our growth strategy was one hundred percent successful and, without First4Lawyers, we couldn’t have scaled up as quickly as we did at that time. First4Lawyers have certainly delivered upon their promise,” says Andrew.
Since the Jackson reforms have begun to erode the profit margin in typical PI work, Halsalls has taken a further strategic step, this time to move into more specialised, higher-value and complex work.
To do this, the firm has set up two new departments to handle both clinical negligence and industrial disease work.
“First4Lawyers is now providing a proportion of the work for these two departments, too,” says Andrew.
Ethics and quality of service are critical factors for why Halsalls originally chose, and has stayed with, First4Lawyers.
“We have always been an ethical law firm, so we have to have a synergy and an alignment with whoever we work with. And First4Lawyers are ethical as a group of individuals, and as a business. They’re customer-friendly, and they’re not using unethical marketing tactics,” says Andrew.
There are regular meetings with the First4Lawyers team, with whom the firm maintains a close working relationship.
Summarising, Andrew says: “We have a good, solid relationship with them, which is both business and personal, and which we all enjoy.”
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