26th October 2026
This October marks 20 years since Tim Newsome joined Myers & Co.
Over the past two decades, Tim has played a key role in the firm’s growth, joining as a solicitor in the litigation team before becoming Managing Director in 2024 following the retirement of Helen and Stephen Myers. During that time, Myers & Co has grown from a small local practice into a thriving firm of more than 50 people, while staying true to the values that have shaped it from the beginning.
As Myers & Co prepares for an exciting new chapter with the opening of its Festival Park office, we sat down with Tim to reflect on the people, experiences and lessons that have defined his journey so far, and his hopes for the future of the firm.
I joined Myers & Co in October 2006 as a solicitor in the litigation team. I had qualified the previous year, so I was still in the early stages of my career and focused on becoming the best dispute resolution lawyer I could be. We had around 12 people, compared with more than 50 today, so everybody knew what was happening across the business and everyone was expected to get involved.
What appealed to me was that its senior leaders were relatively young and ambitious without being pretentious. It was a place where practical advice, hard work and looking after clients mattered more than job titles. Twenty years later, the firm is much larger, but I would like to think those qualities still come through.
Dermot Callinan, my first head of department at Myers & Co, had the greatest influence during my early years. He gave me the freedom to develop my own approach and trusted me with increasingly significant work.
I have tried to adopt his management style: trust good people to get on with their work, celebrate their successes and make sure they know they are supported. That does not mean leaving people entirely to their own devices, but it does mean resisting the temptation to micromanage: apart from ensuring rigorous adherence to the document house style!
Publicly, I can point to acting in a multimillion-pound civil engineering dispute concerning the foundations of a new school.
Other examples include securing substantial damages arising from defective fire-alarm installation works and advising in a multimillion-pound trust dispute. I have also represented clients in complex partnership, shareholder, construction, property and restrictive covenant claims.
However, what matters more to me than any individual case is the brilliant friendships I have made with colleagues. When you work long hours together and spend much of your working lives in each other’s back pockets, you can become like a family. I have kept in touch with many former colleagues, and those relationships mean a great deal to me.
The biggest change was moving from being responsible mainly for my own clients and department to feeling responsible for the whole firm and everybody within it.
The role has made me appreciate how interconnected everything is, because client service, financial performance, recruitment, technology, staff development and culture are all different facets of the same business.
I have also had to realise that what I care about in my working life is not necessarily what other people care about. Previously, as a litigator I had been able to focus on myself and my client without needing to worry about how other people felt. Once I started making decisions as Managing Director, I was dealing with groups of people with different interests. I became aware of how strongly people could feel about issues I thought were less important, and that I needed to consider different perspectives to make the best decisions.
We have gone from around 12 employees when I joined to more than 50 today, which has led to us needing a second office. In the last completed financial year, headcount grew from 43 to 50 and the number of new matters increased. Yet the measure that pleases me most is the two members of our legal team who had left subsequently returned. People choosing to come back says something particularly positive about the culture.
The challenge is retaining the closeness and informality of a smaller firm while developing the systems, specialist knowledge and opportunities of a larger one. We will not always get that balance right, but it is something I remain conscious of as we grow.
Festival Park feels like a physical representation of how far we have come. When I joined a 12-person firm, I could not have imagined overseeing the opening of a second office because we had outgrown our existing space. There is a genuine sense of pride in that.
The new office will provide modern, technology-enabled meeting rooms, networking and event space, better facilities for our people and more convenient access for clients and professional contacts. It will also give us space to grow the team by more than 30 per cent and bring our Dispute Resolution, Corporate and Commercial Property specialists together in a more collaborative environment.
We are retaining our headquarters on Price Street in Burslem. Festival Park is therefore an expansion, not a departure from our roots. Burslem is a significant part of the firm’s identity, while Festival Park will give us room to build the next stage of the business.
I would like Myers & Co to be recognised as one of the strongest regional law firms in the country. We should be ambitious, commercially successful and technically excellent, but still approachable and connected to the communities we serve.
I want us to create genuine career opportunities in Stoke-on-Trent, retaining and attracting talented people while developing more of our own lawyers. Growth should be the result of doing the right things well, not an end in itself.
Technology will inevitably transform legal services, although it is difficult to predict exactly how. When I started at Myers, everyone had a desktop computer with a single old-style monitor, legal work was dictated onto cassettes, and email and case management systems were still relatively new. They improved productivity and changed how we worked, although I am not sure anyone regarded them as especially revolutionary at first.
With AI, change could be even more pronounced, but we do not yet know what form it will take. I think we should embrace technology wherever it improves quality, speed and accessibility, but never as a substitute for judgment, empathy or personal service. However sophisticated our systems become, clients should always feel that a real person understands what is at stake in their lives or businesses.
Tim’s story is closely linked with the story of Myers & Co itself. From joining a 12-person firm in 2006 to leading a growing team of more than 50 people today, he has seen the business evolve while helping to shape the culture and values that continue to define it.
While much has changed over the last 20 years, one theme runs throughout Tim’s reflections: the importance of people. Whether that’s supporting clients through challenging situations, developing the next generation of lawyers or creating a workplace where people enjoy building their careers, those values remain at the heart of the firm.
As Myers & Co looks ahead to the opening of its Festival Park office and the opportunities that growth will bring, Tim’s focus remains the same as it was when he first joined the firm: providing practical advice, building strong relationships and helping the business continue to move forward.
We would like to thank Tim for his dedication, leadership and contribution over the past 20 years, and look forward to seeing what the future holds for both him and Myers & Co.
