Burness Paull pays out staff bonus as profits rise

ALL staff at law firm Burness Paull are being awarded a bonus equal to five per cent of their salary after the firm met its performance targets for the 2017/18 financial year.

Turnover at the firm was up by 7% to £57.6 million, while profits, which fell by 2% in the previous year, rose by 8% to £23.8m.

Chairman Peter Lawson, who replaced Philip Rodney in the role this month, said that as a result of the growth all staff would be given a 5% bonus and could also receive a further 10% based on their own individual performance during the year.

Noting that the results were “bang in line with our growth plan”, Mr Lawson said the firm had been the beneficiary of foreign investment into Scotland on the back of the weak pound.

“There’s a lot of foreign money coming in and we won a lot of work on that through our networks – Lex Mundi has been great for us,” he said.

Burness Paull was appointed as the Scottish member of international professional services network Lex Mundi last year after Maclay Murray and Spens, which had been part of the network since 2001, was taken over by global firm Dentons.

Mr Lawson said Burness Paull had also been a beneficiary of a more stable oil price environment than has been seen in recent years, with that “filtering through to other areas in Aberdeen”.

Meanwhile, Mr Lawson said the firm’s technology practice, which launched two years ago with the hire of partner Callum Sinclair from DLA Piper, was “getting a lot of profile that is converting into instructions”.

“We really needed that as we were finding that more and more deals had a technology flavour,” he said. “We were all great at doing deals but we struggled with the technology lingo – Callum speaks the lingo.”