Jones: ETL is a different proposition to others looking to buy law firms
The UK law firm group owned by a global network of professional service firms is set to return to the acquisition trail in the coming months after a “bumpy” couple of years, its boss has told Legal Futures.
Glaisyers ETL was created in 2018 when ETL Global bought the Manchester-based law firm and then bought London firm Laytons in 2021.
In January 2022, Glaisyers ETL took a minority stake in specialist investment fraud practice Wealth Recovery Solicitors (now WRS ETL), and two months later Laytons bought Cannings Connolly. Last December, Glaisyers ETL took over Liverpool firm Quinn Barrow.
ETL has been more active with accountancy firms and now has 20 across the UK. There are more than 13,000 professionals in its global network, across 50 countries.
UK head of legal David Jones described the relationship with ETL as dual faceted – with Glaisyers both a member of its network and also its UK legal adviser on acquisitions.
“There’s always plenty going on because they’re growing so quickly. But the classic ETL position is that they take [a stake] in the business and then, other than wanting to know the basics of how it’s financially performing, will stay out of it unless asked.
“But when they’re asked, they’ve been brilliant. They always come up trumps and supplied us with information or assistance or whatever else we needed, including finance on occasion.”
Now a business with 85 people and a £9m turnover, Mr Jones said that while in many ways the UK legal arm has developed how he hoped, more work was needed to make it the near-exclusive provider of legal services to the accountants in the group.
“We probably haven’t been as good at communicating our story to them as we could or should have been,” he reflected, especially in the face of existing relationships the accountants have with other lawyers.
A more difficult, and personal, challenge was the illness and then death two years ago of the “irreplaceable” David Marlor, with whom Mr Jones did the management buy-in seven years ago. So what was meant to be a two-person job quickly became a one-person job – and Mr Marlor’s role had been to run the business, with Mr Jones its ambassador.
It has been an “inconsistent year or two” as a result, he conceded, but both Glaisyers and Laytons now have managing partners in place and Mr Jones can resume his role, “which is to talk to the wider world”.
“I think we still need another six months of solidity, but then yes, we’ll be looking for the right acquisitions.”
In the meantime, organic growth is on the agenda – Laytons has a burgeoning dispute resolution team, while corporate activity was also on the up.
Glaisyers is also looking to have more regular contact with SME clients through subscriptions that offered more than legal advice.
‘One ETL’ provides support in the safe and compliant use of artificial intelligence, financial planning and investment advice, and uses ETL Global’s buying power to access insurance and risk management services.
Mr Jones said his approach to acquisitions has changed in that he now saw practice areas as more important than geography, “particularly where we are attracting work from international clients – which is happening more and more – and they don’t really care whether we’re in Manchester or London or wherever”.
That international growth is mainly down to ETL, and particularly from Spain, Poland, the Czech Republic and Italy.
Mr Jones was sanguine about the greater competition for acquisitions in the legal market – “We act for quite a lot of private equity consolidators, so for me it’s great news” – and said ETL was “a different proposition” compared to others in the legal market.
ETL has nearly 50 years of experience of doing deals and, unlike many acquirors, only takes a 51% stake: “If people want a business-as-usual scenario afterwards where staff and clients are looked after the way they were before [but part of a group], then we are that solution.”
In another five years, the solicitor said, he hoped to have increased turnover by 50% but with similar numbers of staff.
This would be thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), which he said was changing how the firm operated, how it charged and how it recruited.
It is using AI to collect information from clients and do the first draft on various documents which are “80%, 85% there with a lot of them”. It allows lawyers to spend more time with their clients, having an account manager-type role.
The impact on recruitment was most marked at the junior level. “The junior people we look to recruit should either have compelling personalities or compelling skills in technology,” Mr Jones said.
He talked about a trainee solicitor who has shown “such talent in identifying and developing AI solutions for our business that even if he was a terrible lawyer – and he’s not, he’s a good lawyer –we would look to keep him on in some form”.
AI would in time mean fewer trainees. “But it also means at the same time that you need to put more effort into the trainees you do take on – not see them as an extra set of hands or an extended admin function, which is quite often what happens with the trainees, but actually see them as a partner in a much shorter space of time”.