The Middleton Ross Round-Up 2023
A review of our business in 2023.
The end of 2023 is just about here and as we prepare to close our doors to enjoy the festive break with family and friends, we want to look back at some of our achievements over the year.
Thankfully the start of 2023 was somewhat more normal than the last few years have been post-pandemic. This year we opened our doors in January and welcomed our clients and staff back to our offices, a very different story to the last few years.
Since the pandemic, we have continued to work on supporting our clients to access our services digitally. This year we have integrated our online payment facility, meaning clients can now settle their invoices via our secure portal on our website.
Estate agency is a competitive market, keeping up with modern-day technology within the sector and offering this to our clients as standard is something we strive to do. In January of this year, we introduced Giraffe 360 to our estate agency department. The Giraffe 360 camera offers the latest technology to our clients, including high dynamic range (HDR) photographs, accurate floor plans, and a high-quality virtual tour. Our property manager Lisa has welcomed the technology and has had excellent feedback from our clients and potential buyers. This year we have upgraded our property shop within our Dingwall office and our new LED window displays allow us to showcase our client's properties from our high street location in Dingwall.
Middleton Ross not only provides legal advice, but we also aim to support our local community in any way we can. At the end of last year, we had discussions with the Developing Youth Workforce (DYW) on how best we can support our local young people into employment and offer work experience, something that had become almost non-existent for young people during the pandemic. In March we were delighted to be invited to the DYW conference held at Dingwall Academy to do a presentation alongside other local businesses on how our work experience programme is helping local students experience work within our sector. This year our business has supported two young people with work experience, one of whom has gone on to study law.
Our work to support local charities has continued this year and we were delighted to be able to take part in Make a Will Month in May to support the Highland Hospice, we are pleased to have donated a record amount to the hospice of £4,679.00. Thank you to all our clients for taking part and helping us raise such a fantastic amount towards a vital service in our local area.
This Christmas we held our Christmas Jumper Day in aid of Mikeysline and raised a fantastic £133 for the charity. Mikeysline supports people struggling with their mental health in the Highlands. Our generous team also decided to swap our annual Secret Santa to donate toys to the MFR Cash for Kids appeal, which will support our local children living in poverty this Christmas.
Middleton Ross would not be what it is without our amazing team of staff who have supported our business this year and gone from strength to strength.
This year we celebrated Erika completing her traineeship. Erika started with the firm just over 2 years ago and has worked extremely hard to complete her studies, we are very proud of all her hard work and look forward to watching her flourish as a solicitor with the firm in 2024.
Madeleine our legal secretary who joined the firm in September 2022 started her paralegal course at the beginning of the year and is due to complete this early in the New Year. We are so proud of her dedication to managing her legal secretary role and her studies and we are looking forward to supporting her in her conveyancing paralegal role in 2024.
We expanded our team in 2023 and have welcomed three new members to the team, read more about our new members of the team section of our website.
2024 will see Middleton Ross celebrate 125 years of our business and we can’t wait to share what we have in store to celebrate this milestone.
We wish all our clients, staff, and their families a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year and look forward to welcoming you in 2024.
