Practice manager appointment for Vincents Solicitors

Vincents Solicitors has appointed Peter Hibbitt as practice manager. A business consultant and legal sector specialist, Peter will be part of the senior management team and will support the firm’s plan to double in size within five years.

A non-lawyer with 15 years’ experience in business development and 20 years in the legal sector, Peter takes on the firm’s first practice management and compliance role, freeing up senior fee-earners to focus on client work and legal issues. He will develop the firm’s recruitment strategy and IT systems to enable more mobile and flexible working and to benefit both staff and clients.

Peter, previously an independent consultant, has been working with Vincents on a consultancy basis for eight months.

He said: “Vincents is an extremely ambitious firm with a modern outlook on management and providing services to its clients, and I like their approach. Flexible, responsive, passionate and determined in what they do, I was attracted by the ethos of the firm and the challenge they have set me.

“Expansion across the business is key to providing clients with expertise in all areas of personal and commercial legal services, and to that end we’re investing in personnel across the family law and conveyancing teams. Our biggest target area is the commercial market and recruitment in the last 18 months has shown how serious Vincents is about that, bringing in some very experienced senior lawyers who are already making extremely impressive strides in that field.

“It will be my job to make sure each department has the people it needs, the IT and systems to deliver the service, in order to achieve the growth target, taking pressure off the fee earners to allow them to get on with helping clients.” Peter is the second non-lawyer to be appointed in a senior management capacity advising the board, following the arrival of finance and commercial director David Hawke last year. Together with managing partner Phillip Gilmore, and senior staff, the board is implementing an expansion strategy based on recruitment and acquisition, broadening the firm’s service offering, increasing the skill base within each department, and expanding geographically into new markets.