West End firm Jeffrey Green Russell has been purchased by Gordon Dadds after entering administration.

JGR appointed an administrator late last Friday as part of a pre-pack deal in which Gordon Dadds purchased its choicest assets. In a statement the firm said that "most" of the current directors of JGR will become partners in Gordon Dadds, and that their clients and practice teams would move across as well. The fire sale has been presented as a merger, although the firm's new name, 'Gordon Dadds incorporating Jeffrey Green Russell' indicates who is the Gordon Daddy in the arrangement.

Gordon Dadds is starting to make a habit of cannibalising rivals which it finds twitching on the slab. Last year it purchased the juicy bits of Davenport Lyons, giving partners cushty new positions while leaving staff behind. The fallout this time is similar, with JGR chairman Philip Cohen admitting that support staff will lose their jobs. Picking a strange moment to praise the rude health of the economy, he said, "we are already helping [staff] to find new jobs within a buoyant London economy", thereby highlighting his own firm's spectacular misreading of the situation.

    JGR in a buoyant economy yesterday

While Cohen was keen to emphasise that JGR's fee-earners were enthusiastic about the deal, which has at least averted unemployment for some of them, that sentiment won't be shared by the creditors and the staff hung out to dry. "This sort of commercial model offers a way forward for the ambitious professional services firm of the future" he predicted, worryingly.

Neither Gordon Dadds nor the administrators would disclose how many JGR support staff and fee earners lost their jobs nor the level of unsatisfied debt that JGR has left behind.
 
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