AIIC Group (AIIC), the holding company behind leading independent law firm Taylor Rose, has completed the acquisition of 15 per cent of Taylor Rose Australia, its joint venture with the Australian firm, GTC Legal (“GTC”), for a consideration of $2.2m AUD.
The joint venture was announced in April 2023 to expand AIIC’s legal consultancy model down under. It involved AIIC working closely with GTC to ‘provide its expertise as one of the largest consultant lawyer networks in the UK’, leveraging GTC’s local market knowledge and advanced client acquisition capabilities.
The partnership saw the introduction of the Taylor Rose brand to the Australian market, operating under the legal consultancy model.
Since then, Taylor Rose Australia has more than tripled its annualised revenues from circa $6m AUD to $20m AUD and increased the number of consultants operating under its brand from 70 to 170, a number currently increasing at between 5 and 10 consultants every month, with applications growing monthly.
In response to this growth, GTC has moved a number of staff across to Taylor Rose Australia, expanding its concierge, accounts and administration teams.
Taylor Rose say they are now ‘comfortably the biggest consultant-based legal services firm in Australia’.
James Stevens, founder and CEO of GTC Legal Group Holdings, the parent company of GTC Legal, commented: “This partnership has proved to be a model joint venture over the past 18 months. The centralised platform from the UK has been key to how quickly we have been able to scale the business. This has been complemented by our own systems, some of which have now been adopted by Taylor Rose in the UK, including our world-leading practice management software.”
Taylor Rose Australia operates predominantly in the area of personal services and has been voted best legal service in Australia two years in a row by reviewers on Product Review, Australia’s first and most comprehensive consumer opinion site.
The firm’s social media campaigns are said to educate the market about the existence and benefits of the legal consultancy model, which Taylor Rose claim were ‘previously almost unheard of amongst Australian lawyers’. The business model offers lawyers a central service platform, brand and management infrastructure from which to operate, in return for a percentage of the lawyer’s revenue. The lawyers themselves are self-employed consultants, who retain an average of 70 per cent of their billings, with the remainder taken by the consultancy firm.
Taylor Rose said in a press release: “The highly fragmented nature of the legal services industry in Australia, and the prior lack of awareness of the legal consultancy model, provides a strong opportunity for the firm’s ongoing fast growth.
“Since the Covid-19 pandemic, the Australian legal profession has changed significantly in terms of employee expectations and the demand for a far more flexible workplace. Many firms now offer a “hybrid” model of two or three days work from home in an attempt to address this, but the consultancy model is better placed to take full advantage of these changing work habits, as professionals seek to reduce travel time and have a better work-life balance. However, Taylor Rose consultants who prefer to be office-based have access to a combination of serviced and permanent office workspaces across Australia, including in every capital city such as Melbourne, Sydney and Perth. Some TRA consultants have also offered up their own office spaces to be used as TRA “hubs”, with recent examples in Newcastle, NSW and Gympie, Qld.”
Taylor Rose Australia recently rolled out an artificial intelligence (AI) agent called “Genesis” to help recruit consultants. Genesis conducts the initial interview and sets appointments for the firm’s Head of Consultant Acquisition. Further developments to Genesis are in the pipeline to enable it to handle more basic administrative work and allow the administration team to provide more advanced assistance to its consultant solicitors.
Adrian Jaggard, CEO of the AIIC Group said: “This investment cements a very successful relationship over the past 18 months. Unlike in the UK, the legal consultancy model was largely unknown in Australia when we embarked on this partnership, but we now have a resoundingly successful proof of concept. We envisage making further investments and increasing our stake in Taylor Rose Australia in future to further build scale in a fast-growing market, in addition to further integrating Taylor Rose across both countries.”
Earlier this year, AIIC was named as the fastest growing legal and accounting services in Europe, according to the FT 1000 list of Europe’s fastest-growing companies by the Financial Times (“FT”). This is the second consecutive year it has appeared in the rankings.
In the year ending 30 September 202, group turnover increased by 15.8 per cent to £97.8m.
Taylor Rose is the group’s largest firm and an innovative top 60 UK law firm operating predominantly in England and Wales. Primarily focused on consumer law, it operates in sectors including property; private client; family; and criminal law.
AIIC has also invested in prop-tech platform SlothMove; KingsleyWood, a consultant-based law firm; and FDR Law. AIIC Group is a provider of technology-enabled consumer legal services and aims to reshape the future of legal services.
