Legal and General Life Assurance Society
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| Public limited company | |
| Traded as | : |
| Industry |
Financial Services Asset Management |
| Founded | 1836 |
| Headquarters | London, United Kingdom |
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Key people
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Sir John Kingman (Chairman) Nigel Wilson (CEO) |
| Products | Life, Pensions and Investments |
| Revenue | £77,969 million (2016) |
| £1,867 million (2016) | |
| £1,265 million (2016) | |
| AUM | £894.2 billion (2016) |
| Total equity | £7,283 million (2016) |
| Website | www.legalandgeneralgroup.com |
Legal & General Group plc, commonly known as Legal & General, is a British multinational financial services company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. Its products include life insurance, general insurance, pensions and investments. It has operations in the United Kingdom, Egypt, France, Germany, the Gulf, India, the Netherlands and the United States.
Legal & General is listed on the and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index.
Legal & General was formed by Sergeant John Adams and five other lawyers in June 1836 in a Chancery Lane coffee shop. Originally called the New Law Life Assurance Society, the society was restricted to those in the legal profession. The name was changed to Legal & General Life Assurance Society to reflect that policies were available to the general public but with share ownership restricted to those in the legal profession. The group expanded in the UK and soon began to acquire overseas life assurance companies, purchasing a pensions business from the Metropolitan Life Assurance Company of New York in the 1930s.
The society became a wholly owned division of Legal & General Group plc in the 1970s. It bought Government Employee Life Insurance from GEICO in the USA (renamed Banner Life) and the Dutch branch of Unlike Assurance Group and also set up business in France during the 1980s.
In the 1940s the main office of Legal & General was moved from Temple Bar House in the City of London to a remodelled former girls' school in leafy Kingswood, Surrey, save for some top management functions which remained in London. The girls' school (St. Monica's), which formed the basis for the site, was attended by the novelist Vera Brittain, mother of the politician Shirley Williams. The Kingswood site, which included sports fields, a park, a large and luxurious swimming pool, a canteen and a simulacrum of an English pub, among other facilities, was expanded in the 1950s and again in the 1980s. In 2015, it was announced that the headquarters would close "potentially before 2025". In fact, after a period of uncertainty for the staff at Kingswood, it was announced that the site would shut much earlier, in 2018.
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