Fashionable shoos

At times like these one’s thoughts turn naturally to Milton Keynes. OK, perhaps, it’s not strictly in the City, but revelling none-theless in its status as home of the IP and IT department of Shoosmiths.

Whether you are a reader of the business, fashion or law pages you will know that Shoosmiths’ hotshot IP and IT team last week pulled off a massive moral victory for the top-notch fashion house Chloé (“a label worn by Natalie Portman and Kirsten Dunst”) in its landmark battle with Topshop.

A great result – but fashionistas and le-galistas alike will be intrigued by this liaison between Shoosmiths, the regional lad, and Chloé the sophisticated city girl. After all, the fashion house is described as “achingly hip”. Shoosmiths is not. Indeed its most glamorous office is Quantum House, which backs on to the railway line at Basingstoke. Its website, meanwhile, is a model of downbeat unpreten-tiousness and opens, disarmingly, with the observation “Ours may not be the first law firm’s website you’ve visited”. I love it.

And its lawyers love it, too. Shoosmiths came top of the recent Legal Week Intelligence lawyer satisfaction survey and its financials are looking very good for a firm that eschews a City office. So maybe Chloé should organise a trip by Portman and Dunst to MK to sprinkle some stardust over the grey filing cabinets. Come the new season we will all be gagging for the latest legal trends from Shoosmiths, the legal label to die for.

Liquid lunch

As this is my week for being nice to the out-of-towners, I can’t resist mentioning the Manchester firm Betesh Fox solicitors – it has just rebranded itself as Ralli.

Quite why “Ralli” I’ve no idea but once its new website has been knocked together maybe we’ll be told. What it has done, however, is to be commendably quick to capitalise on Conrad Black’s brush with the law to issue a ten-point guide on how to avoid expense account misuse. Most of the advice is sound and sensible but it then adds that “everything’s relative”. Hence “a football or showbusiness agent negotiating a big contract could probably justify higher proportionate entertainment expenses than a subcontractor negotiating the same price for a wastewater pipeline trench”. After last week’s weather I cannot imagine anything more exciting than a wastewater pipe.

Holiday romance?

As my wife and I packed our holiday bags I noticed this happy piece of advice from another North West firm, SAS Daniels. “Diary your divorce for sooner rather than later to avoid capital gains tax pitfall,” advised Shelley Chesworth, who points out that summer holidays are the first of two annual “divorce-decider” peaks. “If you are holidaying at a five-star resort or taking a fortnight on your yacht then make that split sooner rather than later,” she says. Apparently if you time your divorce right it gets a tax break. So if you bust up over that lazy breakfast on the yacht in the Maldives don’t waste time on the children. Make sure your lawyers are the first to know.

Must read?

So did nothing of note happen in the City last week? Au contraire. Amid all the excitement about Harry Potter’s last gasp, Fresh-fields published its legal equivalent in the unputdownable Revised Arbitration Rules in Singapore and Dubai. Thank heavens it has arrived just in time. At last I’ve got some proper holiday reading. A la rentrée.

edward.fennell@yahoo.co.uk

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