McKnight: UK market is pretty similar to Australia
An Australian law firm offering SMEs unlimited, on-demand legal services on a subscription basis is set to expand its UK operation after taking private equity investment.
LegalVision set up in the UK in 2022 and has grown to around 40 staff – including 28 lawyers and 12 sales staff – and chief executive Lachlan McKnight told Legal Futures that he wanted to get to 100 “as soon as possible”.
More than 200 people work back in Australia – which provides back-office services for the UK – but nonetheless around 40% of LegalVision’s new business comes from the UK, he said.
Speaking from Sydney, he would not put figures on turnover, although the business as a whole has more than 4,500 clients: “We’ve found the market to be pretty similar to Australia… Obviously we’ve been in the Australian market for a lot longer, so Australian revenues is a lot bigger, but the UK is growing very quickly.”
While the perception in Australia was that the UK economy was in a poor state, “when you get there, everyone just gets on with it. There’s a lot of business being done”.
LegalVision has signed a deal with Quadrant Private Equity, a leading private equity firm in Australia, backing which Mr McKnight said it needed to “take it to the next level… we want to invest more, we want to grow quicker”.
The business was growing at 30% year on year and “as you get bigger, it gets harder to maintain that”, which is where the Quadrant money came in.
It allowed for “investing more in the platform, investing more in technology, investing more in our team, expanding our practice areas to make sure we cover as much as possible for our customers”.
He added: “We see a lot of opportunity to grow quickly in the UK and a lot of our growth will come from the UK.”
LegalVision in the UK is an alternative business structure regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority. Most staff work from an office in Manchester but around 10 operate remotely.
It has little profile in the legal market because “there’s no point spending money on being known by other lawyers, not customers… that doesn’t make us any money”, said Mr McKnight.
But he claimed its website ranked as one of the most visited in the UK for business law keywords.
LegalVision does not handle one-off pieces of work; instead, members pay between £115 and £399 per week, depending on the size of business and length of contract (one, three or five years), for all business-as-usual legal advice.
Services include commercial contracts, intellectual property, employment, e-commerce, leasing and property, franchising, and their use is unlimited. Upon renewal, levels of use are not taken into account.
For legal assistance that falls outside this – such as litigation, negotiating complex contracts, raising capital, and selling or buying a business – there is ‘extras cover’ which can be used for this additional support. This is free for those on three or five-year contracts. Once this runs out, clients are charged on an hourly rate.
Mr McKnight said the model had not changed much over the past three years – although prices have increased, having started at £49 a week in 2022 – but in Australia LegalVision was acting for ever larger companies.
“That’s a trend we expect to see in the UK as well. As we grow, we acquire bigger customers and then you tweak the marketing to focus on those large customers.”
He said no competition of any scale had emerged since its arrival in the UK, explaining that most lawyers did not understand how to make a profit on the model.
It required “a certain amount of scale”, but also a willingness to invest for the future, something equity partners of traditional law firms were unwilling to do, Mr McKnight suggested.
“It’s mainly the short-term nature of how a law firm’s set up. But also a lot of lawyers will still tell me, ‘oh, you can’t make money doing what you’re doing’, even though we are. They still think they know better.”
Peter Elkhouri, investment director at Quadrant, commented: “LegalVision is a business we have been tracking for some time – we have been highly impressed by the team and the way they are disrupting the large and fragmented B2B legal services industry…
“We are excited to be partnering with Lachlan and the team to help further drive growth and awareness of their differentiated offering across Australia, New Zealand and the UK.”
Before founding LegalVision in 2012, Mr McKnight was a banking and finance lawyer at Norton Rose Fulbright in Hong Kong and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer in London, and an investment banker at Barclays Capital.
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