‘Encouraging’ growth in regional legal practices
Meaningful career progression is no longer confined to city-centre locations and “fantastic” opportunities are opening for solicitors in provincial towns, attendees at the Law Society Skillnet Wellbeing Summit 2026 (6 October) were told.
Rebecca McKittrick, one of the speakers, took up a position in September at Power Law LLP’s litigation and dispute-resolution team, which allows her to work from Co Mayo.
The firm has offices in Dublin, London, and Galway.
Prior to this, she had been based in Dublin for several years, having done her traineeship with A&L Goodbody and moving, on qualification, to Matheson.
Misconception
“I spent a number of years in Matheson getting great experience – just as I had in A&L Goodbody – of dispute resolution, figuring out all these different complex, high-value matters and how they’re dealt with,” she said.
“But as a native Mayo woman, I always wanted to come back west.
There was this misconception that, to work on those types of matters, you had to be in Dublin – or at least you had to reside in Dublin, which is simply just not the case.
“Firms like Power Law have seen the opportunity and now, while I’m living in Mayo, I'm working on those types of commercial court cases.”
Wills work ‘has exploded’
Another speaker at the wellbeing summit, Laurie Grace, managing partner of Grace Solicitors LLP in Newpark, Co Kilkenny, sees “fantastic” opportunities in towns outside Dublin for solicitors due to firms merging, or principals retiring.
“As solicitors retire or practices close, the number of clients is actually increasing. Since COVID-19, we have found in private-client work that the number of people who want their wills updated has just exploded,” he said.
“That process then develops into clients getting us to do other things, such as transferring a house into joint names or sorting out other problems. It’s actually creating a huge amount of work.”
Following three mergers over the past four years, Grace Solicitors has gone from a firm where people did a bit of everything to having teams dedicated to wills and probate, personal injuries, family law, and conveyancing.
In May, Grace was appointed as state solicitor for the county of Kilkenny, so the firm also now has a team looking after that workstream.
‘Sky’s the limit’
Grace set up the practice in 1998 with a team of six, and it now employs 21 people.
“In the past two years, we’ve had five applications from young people with law degrees come into us, without even going looking,” he said. “Two of these are staying on with us as trainees, having played a really meaningful part in our practice.”
“I think it's really encouraging that there’s growth coming back into the regional practices, because there is the fear that everything will just get streamlined into the cities,” McKittrick said.
“If you’re somebody who's starting out in a regional firm, you can make that career into whatever else you would like it to be. The world is your oyster, and the sky's the limit – and that's the same whether you're in Cork City or some town in Mayo.”