Holden Smith Law Reveal Their Post-Covid Recovery

Holden Smith Law Firm was founded by David Bancroft, James Smith and Jamie Megson in February 2019. As a firm it specializes in property, litigation, family and wills and probate.

Being a relatively new and smaller law firm, the Covid-19 pandemic hit them hard, with the firm forced to suspend most of its operations and furlough its employees throughout May.

However, as with most legal services the firm is seeing a rise in the number of enquiries it is receiving and across its specialisms it has seen 293 instructions in June alone. Compared to the 64 instructions the firm saw in April, the increase is astronomical at 357%.

Recently founder David Bancroft spoke to our sister publication, Today’s Conveyancer’s Tom Lyes about the firms’ continual growth and recovery following the Covid-19 pandemic.

David revealed the prompts that encouraged him and his partners James and Jamie to set up their own firm.

“James and I had gotten to the stage where we’d been at our firm for quite a long time, and we felt like we’d like to do something on our own. The firm we were at, were really good, but we wanted to do things our way, putting our mark on things and doing them a little bit differently to a traditional law firm like the one we were at.”

Do you have any words of wisdom to anyone thinking about setting up their own firm?

“Believe in yourself.”

After seeing a huge increase in your new instruction numbers, what does the property market look like to you and what does the future hold?

Have you seen other areas of law seeing the same number of enquiries as residential property? And where do you see future growth coming from for Holden Smith Law?

As a Director, how have you led your firm through the pandemic? For example, have you encouraged remote working?

With fraud and organized criminality an ongoing threat for the legal sector, what safeguards have you put in place at Holden Smith Law to prevent yourselves falling foul of criminals?

David reveals the firm, like others is recruiting at the moment, but this is to help grow its third office which is in Halifax.

“We are recruiting at the moment. However we have to tread carefully. Just because the market is experiencing a mini boom now doesn’t mean it’ll be like this forever. You never know what’s around the corner, and on the flip side of that, you don’t want the service you provide to suffer either, so it’s definitely a fine line we’re following at the moment.

“We’re going to open a third branch and we’re looking for new talent to help grow this office base for us in Halifax.”

Holden Smith Law opened its second office in the Crossgates area of Leeds and is set to open a third office in Elland shortly.