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Jones: ETL is a different proposition to others looking to buy law firms<\/p>\n
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 \u201cbumpy\u201d couple of years, its boss has told Legal Futures.<\/p>\n
Glaisyers ETL was created in 2018 when ETL Global bought the Manchester-based law firm<\/a> and then bought London firm Laytons<\/a> in 2021.<\/p>\n In January 2022, Glaisyers ETL took<\/a> a minority stake in specialist investment fraud practice Wealth Recovery Solicitors (now WRS ETL), and two months later Laytons bought Cannings Connolly<\/a>. Last December, Glaisyers ETL took over Liverpool firm Quinn Barrow<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n UK head of legal David Jones described the relationship with ETL as dual faceted \u2013 with Glaisyers both a member of its network and also its UK legal adviser on acquisitions.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s always plenty going on because they\u2019re 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\u2019s financially performing, will stay out of it unless asked.<\/p>\n \u201cBut when they\u2019re asked, they\u2019ve been brilliant. They always come up trumps and supplied us with information or assistance or whatever else we needed, including finance on occasion.\u201d<\/p>\n Now a business with 85 people and a \u00a39m 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWe probably haven\u2019t been as good at communicating our story to them as we could or should have been,\u201d he reflected, especially in the face of existing relationships the accountants have with other lawyers.<\/p>\n A more difficult, and personal, challenge was the illness and then death two years ago of the \u201cirreplaceable\u201d 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 \u2013 and Mr Marlor\u2019s role had been to run the business, with Mr Jones its ambassador.<\/p>\n It has been an \u201cinconsistent year or two\u201d as a result, he conceded, but both Glaisyers and Laytons now have managing partners in place and Mr Jones can resume his role, \u201cwhich is to talk to the wider world\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cI think we still need another six months of solidity, but then yes, we\u2019ll be looking for the right acquisitions.\u201d<\/p>\n In the meantime, organic growth is on the agenda \u2013 Laytons has a burgeoning dispute resolution team, while corporate activity was also on the up.<\/p>\n Glaisyers is also looking to have more regular contact with SME clients through subscriptions that offered more than legal advice.<\/p>\n \u2018One ETL\u2019 provides support in the safe and compliant use of artificial intelligence, financial planning and investment advice, and uses ETL Global\u2019s buying power to access insurance and risk management services.<\/p>\n Mr Jones said his approach to acquisitions has changed in that he now saw practice areas as more important than geography, \u201cparticularly where we are attracting work from international clients \u2013 which is happening more and more \u2013 and they don\u2019t really care whether we\u2019re in Manchester or London or wherever\u201d.<\/p>\n That international growth is mainly down to ETL, and particularly from Spain, Poland, the Czech Republic and Italy.<\/p>\n Mr Jones was sanguine about the greater competition for acquisitions in the legal market \u2013 \u201cWe act for quite a lot of private equity consolidators, so for me it\u2019s great news\u201d \u2013 and said ETL was \u201ca different proposition\u201d compared to others in the legal market.<\/p>\n ETL has nearly 50 years of experience of doing deals and, unlike many acquirors, only takes a 51% stake: \u201cIf 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.\u201d<\/p>\n In another five years, the solicitor said, he hoped to have increased turnover by 50% but with similar numbers of staff.<\/p>\n This would be thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), which he said was changing how the firm operated, how it charged and how it recruited.<\/p>\n It is using AI to collect information from clients and do the first draft on various documents which are \u201c80%, 85% there with a lot of them\u201d. It allows lawyers to spend more time with their clients, having an account manager-type role.<\/p>\n The impact on recruitment was most marked at the junior level. \u201cThe junior people we look to recruit should either have compelling personalities or compelling skills in technology,\u201d Mr Jones said.<\/p>\n He talked about a trainee solicitor who has shown \u201csuch talent in identifying and developing AI solutions for our business that even if he was a terrible lawyer \u2013 and he\u2019s not, he\u2019s a good lawyer \u2013we would look to keep him on in some form\u201d.<\/p>\n AI would in time mean fewer trainees. \u201cBut it also means at the same time that you need to put more effort into the trainees you do take on \u2013 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\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jones: ETL is a different proposition to others looking to buy law firms The UK law firm group…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":589892,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[748,393,4884,1144,712,16,15,1764],"class_list":{"0":"post-589891","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uk","8":"category-united-kingdom","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-england","11":"tag-great-britain","12":"tag-northern-ireland","13":"tag-scotland","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom","16":"tag-wales"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115602261700609421","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589891","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=589891"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589891\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/589892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=589891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=589891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=589891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}