Andrew Roberts speaks to Law360 about Legal Sector M&A

Blockage In Partner Pipeline Could Drive Legal Sector M&A By Najiyya Budaly on Law360 Blockage In Partner Pipeline Could Drive Legal Sector M&A – Law360 Most sectors are ripe for consolidation, given the distress caused by the current economic downturn, but experts say that the legal sector faces another source of merger activity — partners […]

Joined-up Thinking

Andrew Roberts gives his analysis of the current state of the law firm merger market in this article for The Law Society’s Managing for Success magazine. It has been 18-months (at the time of writing) since the country emerged from the third coronavirus (COVID-19) lockdown, vaccination rollout started, and we were able to start working […]

Law Firm valuations in the post-Covid market

Law Firm Valuations “What is my firm worth?” is the question that we are most frequently asked when dealing with firms where partners are looking to retire – i.e: they want to be acquired. Almost all firms will survive the Covid period but once we are through it, we expect a lot of partners will […]

M&A in the new Covid-World. Part 2…

M&A for law firms in the current climate – Part 2. For firms who wish to merge post-Covid.   Once the lockdown ends, I expect the M&A market to be very different. There will be a largish minority of firms who had the practice areas, systems and deep pockets to have come through relatively un-scathed, […]

M&A in the new Covid-World. Part 1…

M&A for law firms in the current climate – Part 1: For firms who are currently in discussions.   Before the lockdown happened in late March we were happily working on 13 different M&A deals of various sizes and aspects but within a few days every single one of these deals was on ice because […]

Is there a future for legal aid firms?

Is there new Life breathing into Legal Aid firms? As we all know recent governments have cut the legal aid budget down to the very minimum and still they look to make savings. Legal aid goes to the very core of what the legal profession should be about, helping the small person stand up to […]

Succession Planning for Law firms

The law firm world has changed without many of us noticing it. Many of the Partners who now wish to retire, bought into their firms in the 60’s, 70’s or 80’s when it seemed good business to buy equity for departing Partners and, more often than not, also agree to pay an annuity to them […]

Why do some mergers work and others just don’t?

Why do some mergers work but others do not? The answer is 6 P’s – Prior Preparation and Planning Prevents Poor Performance. April 2017 This is the £1m question and the simple answer is that the losers frequently conduct the process in a casual fashion, with little structure. Those firms who tackle mergers with intelligence […]

4 merger case studies from 2017

With the summer holidays coming up, we thought it would be useful to review 4 recent mergers to highlight the wide variety of deals that get done. With mergers, no one deal is like another and there is no right or wrong way of doing them! Case Study 1 Our client was a sole practitioner […]

Get merger ready, even if it is not in your plans

How to get your firm merger ready (good practice whether you want to merge or not). As a managing partner, you never know when that merger approach might come through which is right for your firm. At least half of the firms we work with did not actively plan to merge but each approach offers […]