Kem Masinbo-Amobi considers the impact of the “coalition years” & LASPO on sole practitioners
When sole practitioners (SPs) talk about “the coalition years”, some solicitors associate those years with redundancy, which led them to start their own sole practice. The upshot for many of them was positive; they realised their dreams to run their own practice because they experienced redundancy from a larger firm and that gave them the opportunity to rethink their overall career direction.
Consequently, the Sole Practitioners Group (SPG) has seen a steady growth in its membership numbers over the last five years, now with just under 5,000 members. While some larger firms have been merging, closing down or have downsized in order to survive the worst years of the recession, the SP sector is growing, with a lot of new entrants into the market place. These are people still in their 30s and 40s, by and large. They are experts in their field.
These relative newcomers have also changed the overall makeup of sole practice firms. Nowadays the trend is for niche specialists, so modern sole practitioners tend to specialise
