Don't take our word for it..
Roger Clarke joined Semple Fraser after 12 years working in London and it's a move he's glad he made both in terms of career and family life. Roger joined during Semple Fraser's initial drive into the property sector south of the border.
"I had worked in London for 12 years before I joined Semple Fraser as a partner designate. Following the Firm's conversion to a Multi National Practice, I became a Registered Foreign Lawyer with the Law Society of Scotland and a full partner of the LLP. My practice is solely based in England and those in the Firm's dual-qualified teams have been exceptionally busy operating in the English jurisdiction since my arrival, so the fact that I could move officially onto the notepaper without having to re-qualify as a Scots lawyer was a welcome step during this very busy period!
I had in fact heard of Semple Fraser many years ago when, as a fresh-faced law student at Cambridge, I did a summer placement with the Firm a matter of months after it was first established. At the usual stage of a Senior Associate's thinking in London, I was spending a lot of time reflecting the time honoured tradition of which direction I wanted to take my career, balanced with the desire to bring up a young family outside of the centre of London. A chance meeting with one of the partners in the Semple Fraser commercial property team at MIPIM came at just the right time. So when the initial pint of Guinness on the Croisette in Cannes morphed into the opportunity to help spearhead the Firm's drive south of the border, I could clearly see the attractions of lending my experience to an enthusiastic, talented and ambitious partnership who wanted to replicate their success in the Scottish property market throughout the rest of the UK.
In making the move out of London, I was confident that the Firm could make a success of this strategy, but even I have been pleasantly surprised at how quickly the Firm has developed a very significant cross-border practice, which is growing ever stronger.
Over the last 24 months, the Firm has been involved in approximately £1.9bn of investment and development deals in England alone. The acquisition of large retail assets (shopping centres and retail parks) has occupied a large part of my time, with all the associated development angles and subsequent asset management keeping the team very busy. These deals have of course involved close internal cooperation with the teams in tax, corporate, banking, planning and construction and it is great to have experts on hand to enable us to deliver such complex projects, often in the most challenging of timeframes!
There are many law firms in England who would be very pleased with the quality, volume and nature of the Semple Fraser commercial property offer in England. From my perspective, it has been a very positive experience and I have certainly not found a move away from London has in any way equated to a drop in the quality of work colleagues or in the profile, value and variety of work that I had been exposed to previously.
From a personal point of view, that positive experience has also been evident in non-work life in Glasgow. As I had hoped, my family and I have more space and time at home. School options in the Glasgow areas are strong, as they are in Edinburgh too, travel times to and from work are laughably low and much more pleasant than battling up and down the Piccadilly line. The people are friendly with a great sense of humour and the cost of living is on the whole much less than in London".
