Financial highlights
Our resilient and innovative approach has delivered strong profit growth, enabled the successful integration of acquisitions and a continued delivery of organic growth despite disruption due to COVID-19.
A strong track record in a highly attractive market.
Experienced operator delivering first-class returns.
Underpinned by an established corporate structure and with proven resilience through the economic cycle, our strong operational infrastructure provides an efficient and scalable backbone upon which we can continue to grow.
Importantly, our unique culture remains at the heart of each of our offices, with our Client Services team ensuring our ‘one team’ approach and highly commercial mindset is embedded in everything we do.
Statements
Our strategy
Our focus is to build the leading legal and professional services business outside London.
We have continued to deliver strong organic growth despite a challenging market environment.
Whilst COVID-19 had a significant impact predominantly in the first half of the year, our underlying drivers of organic growth remained healthy (attract top talent, deliver more services to existing clients, grow our talent), with each performing in line or ahead of previous fiscal years.
The increased scale and geographical presence achieved in recent years has delivered a step change in the Group’s credibility which is expanding the pool of high-quality acquisition candidates.
Building on our track record of acquiring high-quality businesses with a strong cultural fit, we have continued to execute on our strategy to acquire businesses that provide entry in to a key market, providing a platform for organic growth in the region, or that can be bolted on to build scale in our existing locations.
During the year, we continued to strengthen our operational backbone to support our rapid growth.
Investment in our operational platform ensures the sustainability of our success into future periods, with capacity across our leadership and systems allowing us to continue to benefit from economies of scale.
This continual investment ensures the Group has the capabilities to harvest future opportunities as they arise.
Our ability to react quickly to a changing external environment at the onset of the pandemic demonstrated our operational strength. Early and prudent actions, supported by our operations team and well invested IT infrastructure, saw our colleagues move seamlessly to working from home, and the successful remote integration of acquisitions was completed ahead of schedule.
Technology use is a core part of our strategy to scale the business and increase efficiency.
Whilst retaining the simplicity of our operation with one single set of systems by rapidly transitioning acquired businesses, we have continued to expand the depth and breadth of our use of technology to increase the scalability and efficiency of our operations, and increasingly, to enhance our services to clients.
Our strong foundations of a fee earner base skilled in using technology combined with our scalable infrastructure, allowed us to move to home working with no impact on productivity and to integrate four businesses in parallel onto our platform in a matter of weeks after acquisition.