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| Mann Island, Liverpool Author Brit in Seoul Licence CC BY 4.0 Source Wikipedia Commons |
When Andrea Brewster was President of the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys she occasionally asked me to give talks to the Institute's regional meetings. One of the meetings that I addressed was in Liverpool. An attorney who attended that meeting was Lewis Mulholland. Mr Mulholland is now a partner of WP Thompson Ltd. which is a member of IR Global. He remembered my talk and invited me back to Liverpool to address the UK, Ireland, Isle of Man & Channel Islands Regional Meeting of IR Global which his firm hosted at 1 Mann Island on 27 and 28 March 2025.
IR Global describes itself on its home page as "the leading professional services network, connecting top-tier boutique and mid-sized firms globally." It claims over 1,450 members worldwide in more than 60 practice areas in over 165 jurisdictions. According to an attendee list which WP Thompson shared with me, there were over 30 individuals at the meeting. Most were based in England but several were from Ireland as well as individuals from the Channel Islands, India, Isle of Man, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden and the United States of America. The largest group were lawyers, but there were also accountants, financial services and other professionals Also at the meeting were attorneys and trainees from WP Thompson's Liverpool office whose names did not appear on the attendee list.
According to the timetable, the event began on Thursday, 27 March 2025, with tours of the Beatles Story Museum, the Royal Liver Building, Philharmonic Dining Rooms, Shiverpool (ghost sightings) and the pubs around the Cavern Club. Talks began at 10:00 the next day and continued until lunch at 12:00 with a break for coffee. They resumed at 13:30 and finished at 16:00 with a tea break in between. Drinks were served at the Athanaeum from 18:30 until 19:00, followed by dinner at the club. The day was to end with drinks at the 360 Sky Bar on the 18th floor of its building.
Owing to disruption on the railways caused by unfinished engineering works, my arrival was delayed. As a result, I missed the start of a talk by Karen O’Rourke on the Museum of Liverpool. I visited that museum shortly after it opened in 2011 and was very impressed. It is one of the finest museums in the country. If I were visiting Liverpool for the first time, I would want to see it before visiting the Beatles Story, the Liver Building or the alleged ghost haunts of 18th century Liverpool. I would probably say the same about the Maritime Museum, the Walker and Lady Lever Galleries and other collections in Liverpool.
During the coffee break that followed Ms O'Rourke's talk, I made the acquaintance of Claes Ottosson of Independia, Hub van Grinsven of Maprima, Katherine Evans of Mirkwood Evans Vincent and Julian Potter of WP Thompson. I found that I shared interests and experiences with some of those attendees. For instance, Mr van Grinsven came from Limburg, where I saw an outstanding performance of Giselle by the Dutch National Ballet at the Theater Heerlen on 9 Nov 2018 (see my review Mooie! of 10 Nov 2018 in Terpsichore). Ms Evans is a telecommunications and technology lawyer which is a field in which I practise. Dr Potter specializes in prosecuting patent applications for software-implemented inventions which is also one of my interests.
I discovered another connection during a talk by Phil Adams of Professional Liverpool. Mr Adams was talking about agglomeration and Nevin Sanli of Sanli, Pastore & Hill intervened to point out parallels between Northern England and Southern California. I had been aware of those similarities for some time and pointed them out in several articles in 2014. In How Can Leeds Regain Its Lustre? I wrote on 22 July 2014 in NIPC Yorkshire:
"Manchester and Leeds and also Sheffield and Liverpool are located in an almost continuous built up area that stretches from Wetherby to the Wirral much in the way that Greater Los Angeles stretches from Ventura to San Bernardino in the East and Mission Viejo in the South. ......... Just as the Pennines separate the Leeds and Sheffield city regions from Greater Manchester and Merseyside the Santa Monica and San Gabriel mountains separate the towns and cities of the Pacific Coast from those in the San Fernando Valley.""The big difference between Southern California and the North of England is that the former thinks of itself as a cohesive and integrated whole whereas the latter does not. The sense of identity is not the result of local government unification - there are four counties and many municipalities in Greater Los Angeles - or massive infrastructure investment - there is nothing like the HS3 that the Chancellor of the Excehequer proposed a few weeks ago - indeed public transport in Southern California was appalling until a few years ago. It is entirely cultural and the thing that stops those of us in South and West Yorkshire, Greater Manchester and Merseyside from acknowledging that we already live and work in a conurbation of 7 million people and exploiting the economic opportunities of such a market for every type of goods and services (including in particular legal services) is our mindset."
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The last talk was a dual presentation by Dr Potter and Steve McDonald on preparing start-up companies for investment. Dr Potter dealt with the legal issues and Mr McDonald with the business ones. Their performance was excellent but I got the impression that many of their recommendations would have been expensive to implement and well beyond the means of most of the entrepreneurs who come to me. They did not distinguish between the different types of investors, which is important because angels behave differently from venture capitalists and have different needs and interests, while investors in initial pubic offerings are different again. I also thought that they should have taken the costs of enforcing and defending revocation and invalidity claims since the costs of litigation can dwarf the costs of ptoscution. Having recently shared my Tips for Pitching to Business Angels in NIPC Cymru after attending an angel pitching event, I summarized the suggestions that are set out in that article in the Qs & As.
As it was a pleasant evening and as the route to the Athenaeum had been pedestrianized from Derby Square I decided to walk up to it from the Strand. There were buskers and street vendors about. More than once, I heard choruses of "She Loves You" and other Beatles classics on my journey. I reflected on the remarkable durability of a supposedly ephemeral art form over 6 decades. Although I had been to the Athanaeum more than once, I had forgotten its exact location. Google Maps, as I had learned to my cost in Tallinn when I visited that city last year, is no use at all to pedestrians. It directed me through every side street and ginnel in the neighbourhood before a friendly copper pointed me in the right direction.
The Athenaeum, founded in 1797, is a Liverpool institution. Its members have contributed much to the commercial and cultural life of the city over the years. The meal was scrumptious and I had the good fortune to sit between Ms Evans and Jaroslaw Kruk of KV Kruk and Partners who proved to be very convivial dining companions. As my last train home left Lime Street at 21:47 I had to leave the party at 21:00. My train kept to its schedule with the result that I arrived home just after midnight.
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