Legal Services are GREAT
A global drive to promote the UK’s £25 billion legal services sector at home and abroad has been launched by Ministers today.
The ‘Legal Services are GREAT’ campaign will target stronger links with emerging and established markets across the world and cement the UK’s reputation as the world’s pre-eminent legal centre.
The campaign - the latest under the government’s prestigious ‘GREAT’ series – will highlight the strengths of English law and embed and extend the reach of our legal services to ensure the UK remains the number one place to litigate, resolve disputes and do business.
The campaign was unveiled by Lords justice spokesman Lord Keen at a reception in Singapore this lunchtime.
Lord Keen said:
Our message is simple - the UK is, and will continue to be, one of the pre-eminent legal centres in the world.
Today English law underpins more than a quarter of the world’s jurisdictions, and our law firms, courts and exceptional judges are held in the highest esteem right across the globe.
As one of our greatest exports, we want to ensure our legal services sector remains at the very heart of our future as a global, outward-looking, free-trading Britain.
Lord Keen will travel on from Singapore to Sydney in Australia where he will further promote the new campaign while attending the International Bar Association conference.
Secretary of State David Lidington will front a domestic launch event later this year.
The UK legal sector contributed £25.7 billion to the economy in 2015 – double the sum it generated in 2005.
More than 200 foreign law firms from around 40 jurisdictions operate in the UK, while more than a quarter of the world’s 320 legal jurisdictions are founded on English common law principles.
And in the 2015 International Arbitration Survey, London was the preferred seat of arbitration for 47 per cent of respondents and English law was the most frequently chosen governing law by a significant margin, selected by four in 10.
Notes to editors
The cross-government GREAT campaign has already been used to promote many UK goods and services, from fashion and food, to engineering and manufacturing. It’s a partnership between the private and public sector (previous strands of the campaign have featured brands as diverse as Mulberry, Aston Martin and Tiptree Jams), which has already secured billions of pounds in economic returns for the UK and can be seen in 144 countries worldwide.
The Legal Services are GREAT campaign is part of the government’s plan to make the most of opportunities which arise as the UK leaves the European Union and promote an outward leaning Global Britain, which upholds and underpins the rule of law across the world.