Burges Salmon LLP

Burges Salmon is an ambitious, sustainable and inclusive firm that ensures its clients, people and wider communities flourish. Burges Salmon’s vision is to be the market-leading independent UK law firm that provides the best proposition for its people and its clients.

Everything the firm does is driven by the needs of its clients. By focusing on the markets and areas of expertise where the firm has extensive knowledge and experience, Burges Salmon is able to achieve the best outcomes for clients, who range from large organisations, entrepreneurial businesses and public sector bodies to private individuals and families. The firm is trusted to help them with everything from everyday legal needs to their business critical issues and all points in between.

With offices in Bristol, Edinburgh, London and Dublin, the firm’s people work wherever clients need them to be, both within the UK and internationally. Burges Salmon maintains a collaborative and cohesive culture which underpins the quality of its work and client service. In short, the firm hires, trains and retains the best people to work together to serve clients and provide them with the best possible experience.

The firm works across the UK. Burges Salmon has lawyers who are qualified to work in all three legal jurisdictions in the UK — England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Burges Salmon also works internationally. Across the world, the firm works with a select number of like-minded independent law firms — the firm’s preferred law firm network. Burges Salmon is confident in its own model. In a rapidly changing world, clients instruct Burges Salmon because the firm offers a different experience: unrivalled expertise, excellent service and exceptional value.

The firm competes at the top of the legal market, working for wealthy private individuals, entrepreneurial businesses, large corporates, institutions and public bodies. The firm provides these sophisticated clients with a wide range of services, often at critical moments when astute legal advice and commercial guidance is needed. Working collaboratively, in partnership with clients, Burges Salmon forms its thinking around their needs to ensure delivery of the right solutions when it matters.

Burges Salmon’s clients include organisations such as The John Lewis Partnership, The Financial Services Compensation Scheme, FirstGroup, HSBC Bank plc, Virgin, Costain Group, The Crown Commercial Service, Babcock International Group and Highways England.

• Senior partner: Chris Seaton
• Managing partner: Roger Bull
• Number of partners: 118
• Number of other fee-earners: 420
• Total staff: 1,000+

CONTACTS

Core expertise

• Banking and Finance: Andrew Eaton
• Commercial: Helen Scott-Lawler
• Corporate: Nick Graves
• Dispute Resolution: Andrew Burnette
• Employment: Adrian Martin
• Private Client Services: Jim Aveline
• Projects: Ian Salter
• Real Estate Services: Richard Read

Specialist expertise

• Business Crime and Regulatory Investigations: David Hall
• Competition: Chris Worrall
• Construction and Engineering: Steven James
• Corporate Restructuring and Insolvency: Andrew Eaton
• Defence: Mark Paterson
• Education: Matthew Ramus
• Environment: Michael Barlow
• Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG): Michael Barlow
• Financial Services Regulation: Tom Dunn
• Food and Farming: Tom Hewitt
• Health and Safety: Andrew Burnette
• Healthcare: Patrick Parkin
• Hotels Leisure and Tourism: Richard Read
• Insurance: Matthew Kaltsas-Walker
• Intellectual Property and Media: Jeremy Dickerson
• International Trade: Paul Browne
• Pensions services: Richard Knight
• Planning and Compulsory Purchase: Gary Soloman
• Procurement and Subsidy Control: John Houlden
• Retail: Matthew Sims
• Sport: Jeremy Dickerson
• Tax: John Barnett
• Technology: Jeremy Dickerson

Sector expertise

• Built Environment – Ross Polkinghorne
• Energy and Utilities: James Phillips
• Financial Services: Richard Leeming
• Infrastructure: Stuart McMillan
• Net Zero: Ross Fairley
• Private Wealth: Suzanna Harvey
• Public Sector: John Houlden
• Transport: Brioney Thomas

• Community Engagement: John Houlden
• Pro Bono: Matthew Sims
• Recruitment: Holly Fey (Tel: 0117 307 6360)

DIVERSITY

Diversity and inclusion are integral to our firm wide strategy. Our culture is open, collaborative and inclusive, enabling us to recruit, retain and motivate the highest calibre of people. It is important to us that all of our people feel that they can be themselves at work.

Our Diversity and Inclusion Group supports the delivery of the firm’s diversity and inclusion strategy and meets on a regular basis to ensure our priorities are being met. We have diversity and inclusion ambassadors and a number of internal diversity networks.

We advocate for equality and fairness and participate in various networks and charters. These include The Law Society Diversity and Inclusion Charter, the Bristol Equality Charter, the Woman in Business Charter and the Race at Work charter. We are committed to being an accessible and inclusive organisation and working with other businesses and organisations to share good equality practice and improve. We are proud to be a Disability Confident Committed employer and are committed to supporting our disabled employees and ensuring our recruitment opportunities are accessible to all.

We are an accredited Living Wage Employer as we believe all of our people deserve fair pay.

Our priorities

1. Improving gender diversity in senior roles

We are particularly focused on the development and progression of our female lawyers and business professionals. Our career focussed training equips our future talent with the necessary skills and knowledge to enable them to make informed decisions about their own progression.

We have worked with the Law Society on their Women in Leadership in Law study and we have collaborated with Thomson Reuters as part of their Transforming Women’s Leadership in the Law programme, exploring factors that may be contributing to the loss of female talent and the steps needed to address this.

2. Improving ethnic diversity across the firm

We are committed to increasing ethnic diversity across the firm, recognising the importance of cultural awareness and reaching out to different sections of the community. Race is a visual and obvious difference, as a protected characteristic, where possible we utilise blind recruitment practices and have invested in unconscious bias training.

We support the Stepping Up Programme, a diversity leadership programme for future leaders in Bristol, developing a talent pipeline that more meaningfully reflects our population and community.

3. Supporting and developing our LGBT community

We utilise guidance from Stonewall and other LGBT+ organisations as a tool for continuous improvement and to enhance our inclusion of LGBT+ colleagues.

We are proud sponsors of the Bristol and Edinburgh Pride Festivals each year, marching in the parades and taking part in the festivals themselves. We are winners of Best Law Firm 2017 and 2018 at the Bristol Pride Awards.

4. Improving inclusivity for those with disability

We have partnered with the West of England Centre for Inclusive Living (WECIL) to help us better understand disability in the workplace and accessibility so that we take the appropriate actions.

As a Disability Confident employer we are keen to play an active role in building understanding around disability and accommodating people’s different needs to draw upon the widest talent pool.

5. Social mobility and widening access to the profession

We are committed to improving social inclusion and access to the legal profession. We are founder members of the Social Mobility Pledge and the Social Mobility Business Partnership and signatories of PRIME. We raise aspirations of young people in the local community through our Working with Schools programme.

We have partnered with Rare Recruitment, using their Contextual Recruitment System which allows us to consider applicants’ achievements in the context in which those achievements were gained, taking into consideration several socioeconomic factors including postcode, school quality, and eligibility for free school meals.

Our legal apprenticeship programme was successfully launched in 2016 as part of the Trailblazers initiative and we were the first law firm in Bristol to recruit using these standards. In 2018 we launched our business professionals apprenticeship programme. We hold open evenings for students and their parents to inform them about our apprenticeships and we visit a number of state schools in the region.

Diversity Networks

We support our people with a number of internal diversity networks:

• BProud is our well established LGBT+ network. BProud welcomes both LGBT+ members and allies. The network promotes a culture where everyone is able to be open about their sexual orientation. BProud members run and attend many LGBT+ events through the year.
• BCultured is our BAME network, established in 2018. BCultured aims to promote ethnic diversity and inclusion across all aspects of the firm. Through reverse mentoring, BCultured has helped us to build awareness and better understanding of different cultural perspectives and experiences.
• Family Matters is a network that has been established for those with caring responsibilities in the firm. Family Matters aims to provide a space for people to discuss and share experiences openly and hold regular information events.
• BEnabled is open to anyone who identifies as disabled, cares for someone with a disability or has a general interest in this area and wants to support the Firm in being an accessible and inclusive place to work. The aim of the forum is to ensure that our working environment is supportive, accessible and suitable for all of our people.
• BBalanced is our gender network to help support better gender balance, to identify actions and working practices that better support and enable women in the workplace and to help direct certain benefits, traditionally geared towards a specific gender, more fairly to all.

We are thrilled that the firm was crowned the RollOnFriday ‘Best Law Firm to Work at 2023’, for the third year in a row. This win is particularly positive as it’s based purely on our people’s individual views of the firm and is a further reflection of the amazing culture that we have all built together at Burges Salmon.