Its rivals BPP and the College of Law may have stolen all the headlines in months, but keep a watch this year for Nottingham Law School now that its dean is starting to flex his muscles. It’s just one year since Keith Gaines made the novel switch from corporate law to academia when he left Lovells, after 26 years as a prominent litigator, for the supposedly gentler climes of Nottingham Trent University’s law school. But he is already making a mark.

The first cohort of students has started recently at Nottingham Law School’s (NLS) new London site at trendy Borough, in South London, launched in partnership with Kaplan, the US business training giant. The move gives NLS a foothold in London — to vie in the London market with the College of Law, with its Bloomsbury and state-of-the-art Moorgate sites; and BPP, with its two highly popular London sites. There are places at Borough for 250 students to take either the Legal Practice Course (LPC) or the one-year conversion course for non-law graduates.

Gaines, an insolvency lawyer, whose leading cases include acting for the liquidators in BCCI and acting in the ING Barings collapse, sees this venture as key in the battle of the law schools. Only eight days into post, he had to tender for the jewel contract of providing the tailor-made LPC for five City law firms. BPP, which had the contract, beat off its rivals. Gaines is not surprised. “They were halfway through their contract and we had no provision in London.”

But Nottingham, put on the map by Nigel Savage, now of the College of Law, can quietly boast a few feathers in its cap: its Bar Vocational Course (BVC) won praise from Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury in his recent report on access to the profession and its graduates have a high success rate in securing pupillage: on average 50 per cent, compared with 18 per cent of BVC students across the board. Its LPC course has also consistently kept its “excellence” rating.

Why did Gaines make the move? “After more than 28 years as a practitioner, I wanted to do something different — something that would get the adrenalin flowing. I’d had a long, successful and interesting career at such a great law firm, this was an chance for me to ‘give something back’ to the profession, at a time of great market change.”

The job is a mix of business and academic, steering a school of just over 2,500 students, including 900 graduates (training to be lawyers) as well as some overseas. It also runs a law degree course (LLB) that can be combined with a “minor” in criminology (and from September also with Spanish, business studies or psychology) or as a four-year course including a year’s placement in a job.

Gaines has other ideas. Law schools, he argues, should be opening students’ eyes to recognise the potential of commercial careers beyond private practice or in-house. Lawyers do not feature as prominently at FTSE 500 firms as do accountants, he says. “But lawyers have detailed knowledge of the things that impact on today’s businesses, such as compliance, health and safety, M&A and an ability to convey complex issues . . . so why not go into business?”

He also gives warning of the “looming war for talent”. What has been a skirmish between firms to secure the best graduates is certain to hot up when demographic change brings the expected fall in the 18-year-old age group. “Law firms will be competing not just with each other but with accountants and financial service providers for the cream.” What can they do to ensure that they keep up?

Firms, Gaines argues, need to think laterally: “Herbert Smith, for instance, has taken 20 or so recruits from India. Recruitment of graduates is a well-oiled machine in the context of law firms, but not necessarily in the context of the wider market.”

The battle can only worsen — particularly as lawyers no longer have a loyalty to their firms as in the past, he says. Firms must be more creative in how they recruit and keep their talent — and look more widely, including outside the UK and learning a few tricks from the accountants. At Nottingham, Gaines will clearly be deploying a few new tricks — from the wider commercial world of the law.

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