Law firm owners just don’t get it.

They want significant above-market growth, but how will they achieve this?

They will keep pulling the traditional levers of marketing and business development, but everyone knows this will not produce anything close to what they want.

If they want something truly transformative, then M&A offers the potential to reimagine the combined law firms and create greater value with a genuine catalyst for growth.

This goes beyond the usual costs synergies; for example, acquiring a boutique firm that is a specialist in a particular field, e.g., construction, can lead to widening the client base so that boutique law firm clients are offered legal services for all their needs. The larger entity can also offer construction legal services to a wider market.

The value creation waves can just keep coming.

My role as a M&A broker is to go beyond the obvious financial aspects and look at how bringing both firms together makes the new entity truly “special”.

This approach is backed up by recent McKinsey Consulting research and experience:

“Not every merger or acquisition calls for large-scale transformation. But many deals represent catalysts for substantial change, as well as opportunities to create more value. Leaders need to take the time up front (balancing day one urgencies associated with M&A with longer-term strategy) to consider the transformation opportunities inherent in a deal. It will mean reimagining the combined business, assessing the long-term full potential value of the deal, building an execution engine, and developing the talent and capabilities needed to sustain change. It will require viewing traditional integration tasks through a transformation lens and taking a bold and strategic approach to change.”

They have gone further and identified the "secret sauce" behind this and identified four factors that are particularly important for leaders to focus on if they want transformational M&A to succeed:

• Strategy: Reimagine the combined law firm and organisation.
• Value: Identify and pursue the full-potential value creation opportunity for the combined entity.
• Execution: Establish and empower an execution engine for the combined entity.
• People: Attract and develop new talent and capabilities.

See the brilliant summary and advice in their recent article below.
https://zurl.co/gNlT

Private Equity Strikes Again in the Legal Sector

No one in the corporate legal world had until recently heard of Inflexion Private Equity Partners. This changed dramatically when they announced in July the purchase of the top 50 law firm, DWF.

This London-headquartered private equity house was set up over 20 years ago by Simon Turner and John Hartz, described by insiders as the “doyens of private equity”.
The company has approximately £8bn in funds under management, and its current portfolio in the legal sector includes Chambers Directory, National Accident Helpline, a claims management company in the personal injury sector, and O’Neil Patient, a top 100 conveyancing law firm.

Well, they have now announced a very astute investment in an online platform created by city giant Allen & Overy.

The legal and compliance data subscription platform Aosphere will become a standalone entity, with A&O retaining a significant minority stake in the business it created in 2002 as Derivative Services and rebranded in 2015.

Alongside the “strategic investment” by private equity firm Inflexion is backing from Endicott Capital, a US-based investor specialising in the information services industry.

Another private equity-backed business, Lawfront, is also in the news again for another acquisition. This time is number six, namely acquiring Leicester-based Patterson Commercial Law, which has 10 fee-earners. Another strategic move as this strengthens by way of a tuck in the acquisition of the large East Midlands firm, Nelsons.

Behind Lawfront, is Blixt, a pan-European private equity firm headquartered in London that claims to have access to more than £200 million in long-term institutional investor funding.

Putting aside the usual lawyer disdain for private equity in this sector, the reality is that likes of Inflexion and Lawfront would not be investing unless they could see a return. Interestingly, in 2019, the Financial Times reported that Inflexion was producing returns as much as three times the amount invested.

It is no surprise that these firms are expanding rapidly in the legal sector. More, I’m sure, will follow!
https://zurl.co/GtlB