The Big Interview
Andrew sets Direction Law on route to success When Brian Sharratt set up his own law firm as a sole practitioner in Whitstable in 1976, he’s unlikely to have imagined how successful the firm would become. Fast forward 45 years to 2021 and the firm is now called Direction Law and has eight partners, 170 staff and offices in Canterbury, London, Wells and Birmingham.
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oday the firm is headed up by managing partner Andrew Theoff, who has had an interesting career journey of his own. He joined the Canterbury office of the original firm just three years after qualifying as a solicitor and swiftly rose up the ranks, becoming a partner in 1999. In his early days there, Andrew acted for housing associations in the purchase of individual properties and land for development and later ran the plot sales team. In 2004 Andrew joined another company in Ramsgate where he dealt with more local clients as well as building an affordable housing team from scratch.
After just 2 years, he left to set up his own business along with Wayne Moore-Read, who is now Direction Law’s senior partner and who he met initially in 1997 when they both worked in Canterbury. As fate would have it, they went full circle by merging their firm with the firm they had both started out with, to form what is now Direction Law. At the new, larger company, Andrew established Direction Law’s new build department, initially acting for private individuals buying shared ownership homes from housing associations, then expanding the department to encompass purchasers buying from private developers, finally splitting it into two distinct teams and handing over the reigns to others when he became managing partner. Since the merger, Direction Law have experienced a period of unprecedented growth, with staff numbers increasing almost five-fold from 35 in 2010 to 170 today.
❛❛We had our best ever start to a year in 2020
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but then COVID-19 hit the country. For a few months work dropped considerably but, when the housing market re-opened at the end of the first lockdown, instructions quickly picked up and we ended the year in an even stronger position than we started it.
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