AIIC Group, the holding company behind Taylor Rose, has acquired a 15% stake in its joint venture with GTC Legal, Taylor Rose Australia, for $2.2m AUD. The partnership, which was launched in April 2023, aims to expand AIIC’s legal consultancy model in Australia. This collaboration combines AIIC’s expertise with GTC’s local market knowledge to introduce the Taylor Rose brand in Australia, operating under the legal consultancy model.
Since the joint venture’s launch, Taylor Rose Australia has seen remarkable growth, tripling its annualised revenues from approximately $6m AUD to $20m AUD. The number of consultants operating under the Taylor Rose brand has also surged from 70 to 170, with an ongoing increase of 5 to 10 new consultants every month, driven by a growing number of applications.
In response to this rapid growth, GTC has also moved a number of staff across to Taylor Rose Australia, expanding its concierge, accounts and administration teams.
Taylor Rose is 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 site1.
Its social media campaigns have done a lot to educate the market as to the existence and benefits of the legal consultancy model, which was 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 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, making the process much more efficient. 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.
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.
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 prestigious 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% 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.