The Financial Conduct Authority has updated its legal services framework with a new four-year panel running from 1 April 2025 until 1 March 2029, valued at up to £20m and featuring 14 law firms.
Clifford Chance, Norton Rose Fulbright, Eversheds Sutherland, Pinsent Masons, Clyde & Co, and Clarke Wilmott all featured on the FCA’s previous panel but have not been reappointed.
Ashurst, Dentons, DLA Piper, Mills & Reeves, Burges Salmon, Bevan Brittan, Broadfield, Kingsley Napley, and Gowling WLG have retained their places.
The framework also features five new firms: Addleshaw Goddard, CMS, Fieldfisher, Brodies, and TLT.
Although the new panel includes one fewer firm than before, the estimated spend of £20m, according to a government website, marks a significant increase from the City watchdog’s previous four-year framework. That earlier framework, which ran from August 2020 to June 2024, had a contract value of £8.6m.
As previously, the framework is divided into two lots: public law and corporate and commercial law. The FCA took bids from firms that wished to appear on the roster between July and September 2024, with the panel initially expected to take effect from January 2025.
It has been an eventful period for the regulator. Despite strong criticism of the City watchdog from an all-party parliamentary group report in November, with its leaders branded ‘opaque’ and ‘unaccountable’, FCA CEO Nikhil Rathi was reappointed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, for a second five-year term running to 2030 earlier this month.
Last month, the watchdog decided against bringing in new diversity and inclusion rules for financial firms. While the move was explained as a way of decreasing the ‘regulatory burden’ in the context of the government’s drive for economic growth, it came in the context of a widespread retreat from diversity policies across the financial and legal sectors in the face of pressure across the Atlantic from US President Donald Trump.
