Stephen Stout, Landmark Information Group

'I’ve been with Landmark for three years. I first became involved with Nabarro on a rather important and difficult acquisition, which was going on when I started. This culminated in us successfully acquiring the business. That was a good win!

Nabarro handled the deal with a lot of skill. It’s a good example of how they can pull together a team to bring the deal to a successful conclusion but also get it through the competition authorities as well. One of their real strengths is dealing with the public sector - knowing the law and the regulations and also how to deal with the people.

The main thing that I’ve found over our time with Nabarro is that they have really made an effort to be proactive. So many law firms just react to what you say. The number one thing for me in this regard was that we were interested in going into Europe and Nabarro used their associated law firms to survey a whole series of countries. As a result it enabled us to select the target countries to go for first. That was just over 18 months ago and in October 2006 we opened our office in the Netherlands, and hopefully there'll be more to follow.

The other area is public sector information regulations and the Freedom of Information Act. These are new areas of law which are very important to us as a business because we use a lot of government data in our products, and we are trying to get more data out of government departments. Many firms would’ve hesitated to give advice on these areas, because they’re so new, but Nabarro is very good at explaining the situation and suggesting the best course of action.

They’ve run conferences for us to update my senior team on various issues. These have been very useful for us. It’s another example of things that they don't have to do - they could wait until we come with the next thing that we need doing.

They have a very can-do attitude. They’ve made a genuine effort to get to know not just me but all my senior team.

Their advice is always straightforward, not overly wrapped in legalise and it always comes with a recommendation.

It feels like Nabarro is our in-house legal counsel. We’re part of a bigger group, DMGT, and it’s as if Nabarro is part of that, too. You feel you’re on the same team and it’s a much closer relationship than just buying in a service.'