Cards on the table

If you’re wearing a suit when you meet Quentin Poole you’ll feel overdressed. He looks more like a teacher than a lawyer: no jacket, top button undone, no tie. The softly-spoken senior partner of Birmingham’s biggest firm perfectly personifies the self-styled benevolent culture of Wragge & Co, a culture that ensures it is a permanent feature on the Financial Times’ best places to work list. But, like the firm, Poole’s unassuming demeanour masks a resolute efficiency that it is a mistake to underestimate. Wragges’ business ambitions are far from modest.

Boasting a profit margin of 31%, the firm is the 15th most efficient in the current LB100, an impressive performance for the UK’s 26th largest law firm by turnover, and especially in a time of poor financial results – it recorded an eye-watering 41% margin the year before. Despite its policy of fiscal responsibility, Wragges has suffered like everyone else. In fact, with two redundancy consultations and a 17% crash in revenues over the 2008/09 financial year, it could be argued that the firm has had a more difficult time than most. But while other national players have been implementing cash calls and suffered the ignominy of banks making their business decisions, Wragge & Co has been quietly sitting on its £20m war chest and discussing investment opportunities.

‘It is in the Wragge & Co bloodstream to be very conservative financially,’ Poole explains when asked how the firm has managed to retain its reserves throughout the current turmoil. ‘We’re laughed at by our accountants for being so conservative, but the fact is that we’ve been through recessions, pain and angst, and we’ve been badly affected by changing our client base to focus away from the Midlands, but we still have cash in the bank and no borrowings.’

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