A BRIEF HISTORY OF MAX ENGEL
Max David Engel qualified as a solicitor in 1938 having achieved Honours in the final Law Society exams. He set up an office in London but within a year the war broke out, and he volunteered for service in the RAF. He won his pilot's wings and became a flight lieutenant.
The winds of war eventually blew him and his family towards Northampton, where he met a local solicitor, Bunny Douglas, and joined his practice for a time before setting up on his own, in an attic off the Market Square, in 1949.
He made his reputation as a formidable defence lawyer, and the word soon went round that if you were in trouble, this was the man to sort it out. It was said that a boy in a playground once shouted to a school bully: "I'll set Max Engel on you, I will!"
In 1956 he moved the office to 8 Hazelwood Road. Since then Northampton and the legal world have both changed beyond recognition; rival firms have nearly all merged or vanished.
Max Engel's practice has adapted, expanded and modernised to meet the needs of its clients. Its central focus has switched from crime to the complexities of property and commerce. But the office remains where it was. And the principles established remain unchanged today: the client comes first.
Max himself remained associated with the firm until he died in 2005, aged 93. By then he had been in practice for 67 years, putting him in the longest-serving dozen out of the 76,000 solicitors in Britain.
But to the end, in any case he took on, he could outwit the opposition who failed to realise that he worked harder than they did and knew the law better.
Richard Engel, who joined his father as a trainee in 1967, became senior partner in 1980 and maintains the family tradition of a top-class service.
The message is the same now as it was sixty years ago: we're on your side.
