Wragge Lawrence Graham & Co has agreed to combine with Canadian firm Gowlings from January 2016, the firm announced today.

The new firm, which will be known as Gowling WLG, will have more than 1,400 lawyers and legal professionals and will have 18 offices across Canada, Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

The firms' partnerships and profit pools will remain separate but they will combine using a UK company limited by guarantee. It is a legal structure often used by financial advisory firms, including PwC and Grant Thornton.

Wragges and Gowlings, which previously had a 'best friends' relationship, had been in talks for the last 12-18 months about the possibility of merging.

Wragges chief executive David Fennell said: "From a client perspective it will be a new international law firm that will offer clients a seamless and distinctive service.

"Clients' legal issues are increasingly international so we want to put ourselves in the strongest position to meet that demand. Last year's merger between Wragge & Co and Lawrence Graham was the first step. Now, with Gowlings – a top-quality firm we know well, admire, like and trust – we are ready to take the next step on our ambitious journey."

Fennell cited Asia-Pacific and Europe as the areas of most interest for possible future tie-ups. He ruled out a move to the US, saying: "We have no plans to open in the US or to seek another member there. Both of our firms have established relationships with really good firms in the US."

He declined to comment on whether the merger was put to a vote of the Wragges partnership, but said: "What we got from our partners was a really strong endorsement of our strategy and a really strong endorsement of our proposal to combine with Gowlings."

The new firm's key areas of focus will be intellectual property, energy and natural resources, advanced manufacture, life sciences, projects and infrastructure and technology and communications.

There will be no firmwide managing partner, chief executive or senior partner at the combined firm.

Instead both firms will retain their existing partnership and management structures and the combined business will be governed by a joint board with three members from each firm represented. The two chief executives, Gowlings' Scott Jolliffe and Wragges' Fennell, will have a seat. Fennell said that the process for appointing the other members had not yet been agreed upon.

The combined firm will also have a joint conflicts committee and a mechanism to cross-incentivise members from each profit pool.

It will have offices in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Hamilton, Waterloo Region, Calgary, Vancouver, Birmingham, Brussels, London, Monaco, Moscow, Munich, Paris, Beijing, Guangzhou, Singapore and Dubai.

It will be the second tie-up in just over two years for Wragges. Midlands firm Wragge & Co merged with London-based Lawrence Graham in December 2013 to create a £171m-turnover firm with 770 lawyers and 10 offices.

Wragges has made no secret of its desire to grow through further mergers following the 2013 combination. In an interview with Legal Week in 2014, Poole said: "We are very open minded about a global merger."

He added that a merger with a firm in Germany, Canada, Australia, South Africa or Asia were all possibilities. At the time he said talks with potential partners were already underway.

Gowlings had also been the subject of merger rumours for some time. In 2013 it denied persistent rumours of a potential tie-up with Asian-headquartered firm King & Wood Mallesons.