"If you had told me six months ago that Freshfields was going to open in Manchester, I would have been slightly amazed."

That's the verdict of the outsourcing centre chief at a top 20 firm on Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer's plans to open a new low-cost base in Manchester.

Freshfields outlined its plans in an internal memo to staff on 9 February. It is aiming to relocate some back office staff to Manchester by the second half of this year, a move that will kick off a phased expansion in the city that will see some lower cost legal work being handled there by 2018.

The extent of the firm's ambition for its new Manchester base is underlined by the fact it is looking for 80,000-100,000 sq ft of office space. By way of comparison, CMS Cameron McKenna's new Cannon Street office will take up 130,000 sq ft.

According to Estates Gazette, potential locations include One and Two St Peter's Square, Allied London's Cotton Building, Ask Developments' 101 Embankment, English Cities Fund's One New Bailey and NOMA's Hanover Building as the firm looks to cash in on rents that average about half the cost of London real estate.

It is understood that the firm is not ruling out some redundancies as a result of its plans.

"Just like all of us [Freshfields] are doing what the client wants," comments Alan Greenough, who is heading up the low cost centre Hogan Lovells set up in Birmingham last year. "All top law firms need to reduce their cost base."

Freshfields' decision to choose Manchester as its base reinforces the impression that the current trend is for law firms to locate their low cost centres within easy striking distance of London.

Although rents are obviously lower in Manchester than London, the firm has eschewed the subsidies snapped up by the first wave of firms to go down the nearshoring route; Ashurst, which set up shop in Glasgow, and Herbert Smith Freehills and Allen & Overy (A&O), which opened bases in Northern Ireland, the latter firm receiving the not insubstantial sum of £2.5m from Invest Northern Ireland in exchange for the 300 jobs it created for its Belfast support centre launch in 2011.

If Freshfields' ambitions for Manchester were purely confined to back office functions, it might have also made more sense to pick a location such as India, as Clifford Chance did in 2006, where labour costs are a fraction of those in UK.

"It must be possible [to set up a legal support centre offshore] but it inevitably introduces different challenges into the equation," says Barry Gross, who heads the low cost office opened in Manchester by Berwin Leighton Paisner last year. "Simply getting on a train to go to Manchester and engaging with the staff is much easier than getting on a plane."

Gross predicts an initial squeeze on the market in terms of available talent, but that this will be offset by more lawyers coming into Manchester given the attraction of big names like Freshfields.

"Historically, lawyers have thought if they wanted to do the best work and if they wanted to do the best deals they needed to be in London," he says. "But you could see people starting to consider in more detail moves away from London… there's potential for a better work/life balance."

Given the frequency of nearshoring announcements – with Latham & Watkins announcing its own plans for Manchester just last month - soon commentators will be expressing amazement when a top firm announces that it won't be expanding into one of the UK's regional centres.

Related:

A shore thing? What in-house lawyers think about law firm near-shoring

Tales from the front line – young lawyers share their experiences of working in a low-cost legal services centre