Bill Jones, chairman of IP21 at Broadland Business Park, Norwich. Photo: Andy Darnell

Intellectual property lawyers ip21 are aiming to boost turnover and staff levels by up to a fifth this year after moving into newly-built offices in Norwich.

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The company turned over £2.5m in the 12 months to the end of March, 17.5pc up on the year before.

And the firm hopes to replicate that growth by expanding turnover by another 17pc to 20pc this year.

At any one time it deals with 400 to 500 clients and helps to protect inventions and designs created by individuals through to large organisations.

The firm currently employs 22
staff, five based in London and another 17 at its headquarters in Norwich.

It recently moved from the Norwich Research Park to newly-built
offices at Broadland Business Park to take advantage of the “bargains to be had” in the local office space
market before the economy fully recovers.

Currently it occupies 4,000sq ft of space, but intends to take up an option for another 4,000sq ft to fill an entire floor to provide them with the space to hire new staff.

Over the next 12 months the firm hopes to see a further pick-up in business and aims to take on four or five new members of staff to handle the extra workload.

Chairman and owner William Jones said: “In April we’ve just had our best month ever, which, given all the distractions: the Royal Wedding, the many bank holidays, I take as a very good sign.”

Mr Jones said that whenever the firm advertised vacancies in Norfolk the response was “huge” and “extremely high quality”.

He added that the move to new accommodation was designed to project a high-quality image to match the expertise of the firm.

“We want to be able to bring new clients and have them say ‘what a great set of offices you work from’,” he said.

The chairman of the firm predicted that after being hit by the effects of recession that his clients, and therefore his own company, had started to see good recovery.

“Our clients, who are industry, got slaughtered and we saw the effects of that, a lot of them went out of business,” he said.

“I think we’ve seen the worst of the downturn. There’s not going to be any sudden bounce recovery, it’s going to be a steady climb out of this.”