Solicitors group reports best ever financial results
Manchester-based personal injury law firm, Express Solicitors, has announced its best ever financial results, with group turnover reaching £27.4m.
Caseloads have grown, despite the COVID-19 outbreak, by 6.7% to 14,545.
Group turnover of Express Solicitors Limited and its sister company, medical reporting agency Ontime Reports Limited, grew by 29% from £21.3m in 2019 to £27.4m in 2020.
Like-for-like profit before tax and goodwill amortisation for Express and OnTime Reports combined was £4.65m, compared with £1m the previous year.
The pandemic brought on numerous challenges for the two companies.
During the latter part of its trading year, the strength of the firm’s robust IT infrastructure has paid dividends during lockdown as 85% of staff were successfully working from home within 10 days of the lockdown being announced.
Only 12% were furloughed and three per cent remained in the office to deal with essential day-to-day business.
Express Solicitors followed this with 45 promotions across the business, including Jennifer Lutton and Seetal Sagar-Jhanji who have been promoted to partners, bringing the partnership up to 31.
Head count has remained the same at 320 as the planned recruitment and training had to be put on hold from March onwards.
The firm has also promoted five litigation executives to trainee solicitors.
The number of new cases has dropped in the past six months due to lockdown with a large proportion of the country furloughed and not attending work, and there has been a steep decline in the number of road traffic accidents and accidents at work.
Some reports have shown a decrease of 60% in RTA cases and a 40% decrease in accidents at work during this time – this will impact the business in 12 to 36 months due to the nature of the cases as they conclude.
In view of this, Express Solicitors has uplifted the anticipated marketing spend by more than £2m in the upcoming financial year to try to combat this with substantial investment in online marketing as well as the routes that it has used successfully over the past 20 years.
The firm has been approached by numerous firms and brokers of law firms who are looking to exit the personal injury market over the past six months, some of which it is pursuing and if successful will increase both turnover and caseloads helping to cement itself as one of the top firms in England and Wales, which specialises purely in personal injury.
Express Solicitors, which was founded in 2000 by managing partner James Maxey, is ranked in The Lawyer Top 200, its lawyers and the firm are recognised in The Legal 500 and the firm is noted in Chambers and Partners.
