Based in Liverpool, Hill Dickinson has offices across the UK and overseas and says its corporate and banking team has smashed its previous deals record by £1bn. Tony McDonough reports

Liverpool law firm Hill Dickinson’s corporate team completed a record £2.6bn worth of deals in 2020 – £1bn more than in 2019.

Based in St Paul’s Square in Liverpool city centre, Hill Dickinson says its team completed 150 deals in 2020 across wide range of markets. This was almost double the number of transactions it completed in the previous year.

This performance ranks Hill Dickinson as the second most active legal adviser in the North West in the Experian 2020 annual league table, published at the of January. And the firm’s corporate and banking team across all UK offices was the 20th best nationally.

The firm employs more than 850 people including 185 partners and legal directors, and also has offices in Manchester, London, Leeds, Piraeus near Athens, Singapore, Monaco and Hong Kong.

Its lawyers successfully overcame logistical difficulties and executed a number of complex transactions during the peak of the UK COVID-19 lockdown. This included a number of M&A transactions, IPOs and one of the largest secondary fundraisings by an AIM company during the lockdown.

It has continued to expand to meet client demand. Recent hires have boosted the corporate and banking team to more than 70 specialist lawyers across the firm’s offices in Liverpool, London, Manchester and Hong Kong.

Craig Scott, national head of corporate, said: “Despite operating in profoundly challenging market conditions, 2020 delivered an extraordinary year for our firm’s national corporate and banking team with a significant increase in our completed deal volumes at a time when transaction volumes in the market overall significantly reduced. 

“Like most businesses, we experienced a hiatus in quarter two when the first lockdown hit as businesses focused on understanding the challenges ahead. But we continued to work alongside our clients to help them adapt and prepare for the reopening of the economy.

“By quarter four, many of our clients had taken actions to strengthen and experienced a quite startling market recovery and appetite for continued investment and strategic expansion, demonstrating the sheer resilience of certain key sectors in the UK and certain overseas markets.”

Mr Scott said that trading conditions would remain “challenging” well into 2021 due to the ongoing COVID pandemic as well as logistical and regulatory challenges resulting from the UK’s new trading relationship with the EU.

“Despite that, we remain positive that agility, sector expertise and our responsiveness to market conditions will be instrumental in maintaining the good relationships we have with our clients and we look forward to working with them again in the year ahead,” he added.