Law Firm Offering Free Initial Legal Advice to SMEs

National firm Irwin Mitchell has announced it is supporting the private sector’s new flagship business growth scheme, ‘Startup Britain’, by being one of the founding sponsors and legal advisers to the initiative.

Launched this week by Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne, StartUp Britain is designed to support entrepreneurs and growing businesses by giving preferential rates on a host of services including advertising, IT and business mentoring.

In addition to Irwin Mitchell, which is offering initial free legal advice to StartUp Britain’s organisers as well as businesses that sign up to the initiative, Barclays, O2 and serviced offices group Regus have backed the scheme. The organisers estimate that the support promised so far by over 60 leading companies is worth more than £1,500 for every start-up business in Britain.

Google is providing an amount of free advertising for each start-up while Regus is giving a month's free Businessworld membership. O2 is providing a month's free line rental and Fujitsu is giving 10% off the annual costs of IT storage and processing needs through its online ‘cloud’ service.

StartUp Britain is being supported by the Government and was launched to coincide with the Government’s own ‘Tenner Tycoon’ campaign which aims to encourage entrepreneurial thinking by offering 250,000 youngsters £10 loans.

Niall Baker, Head of Irwin Mitchell Business said: “We believe the StartUp Britain scheme will greatly assist in getting the economy moving. Fast growing and start up businesses are the engine room for the economy as not only do they create new jobs, they have the potential to be the big organisations in then future.

“We already provide a similar helpline service to SME customers of one of the UK’s biggest banks and as a leading business services law firm, we were keen to get behind and support an innovative scheme such as this. It is consistent with what the Government is doing in other areas and we are confident it will go a long way to developing a strong and sustainable economy in the future.”