Black: Aliter have invested heavily
A Manchester-based law firm backed by private equity investment wants to at least triple in size over the next two years and is planning for multiple acquisitions by the end of 2026.
Aliter Capital quietly took a majority stake in BBS Law in autumn 2024 and backed its acquisition of North London commercial firm Carter Bond seven months ago.
“In 2020, we were a £3m turnover law firm in Manchester only,” managing partner Dov Black told Legal Futures.
“And from 2020 to 2024, we went on a buy-and-build journey and we quadrupled with a combination of organic and inorganic growth to £12m. I think what happened was that we were suddenly noticed.”
Those acquisitions were OGR Stock Denton and Manual Sweden, both in North London, while property and secured lending specialist Avi Barr brought over his team from London firm Lawrence Stephens.
Mr Black continued: “We were enjoying growing the firm and felt strategically that, to go to the next level, we were going to need a greater level of investment. And we started getting approaches from trade and from private equity. We particularly liked the Aliter approach.”
This was because of Aliter’s interest in professional services and also in maintaining BBS’s culture.
Mr Black said the last 18 months have borne out his hopes. “They’ve heavily invested in the business to the benefit of our staff. They’ve invested in legal technology, they’ve invested in premises, they’ve invested in central management systems, and they’ve improved both the client experience and the staff experience.”
He has also benefited from joining a working group made up of Aliter’s other four current investments – digital learning provider Sponge, healthtech company Athera Healthcare, critical network infrastructure firm Serbus, and digital transformation business TXP – cover a host of topics, such as AI, in which BBS is investing “heavily”.
Carter Bond has now gone through a thorough six-month integration process and the plan is to “repeat that again and again throughout the country” to make BBS a top-100 firm.
Turnover at BBS, which was founded in 1978, has now reached £17m and Mr Black said he planned to get to £50-60m in the next two years. “We believe that we can offer greater services to our clients through growth.”
Currently it has six main practice areas – corporate, commercial property, employment, commercial litigation, private client and family – and Mr Black predicted that “by the end of the journey, we will have added tax, banking, insolvency, intellectual property and IT”.
Acquisitions also delivered “deeper expertise”, such as Carter Bond’s specialist healthcare department.
Mr Black outlined how BBS would retain its focus on “an entrepreneurial, owner managed SME client base, not a corporate client base”, but with a national footprint.
Unlike some other buy-and-build models, however, acquisitions would not lead to back-office redundancies, he stressed. None of the deals to date have led to jobs losses.
BBS’s “sweet spot” was firms with a turnover of £3-10m and an EBITDA of around £1.5-2m. The challenge was not so much identifying law firms to buy but integrating them, and “that is where I think we stand out”.
“The easier piece for me is finding law firms,” Mr Black said. “The harder piece is making sure that they are the right fit and that you integrate them and look after their people and their culture in that process.”
BBS was now “integration ready”. One deal is close to completion and Mr Black is in talks with two more.
“By the end of 2026, I would hope that we’ve completed on three to four more law firms.”
There is a lot of talk about the need for cultural alignment in law firm deals but how tangible is that? “I think it’s less nebulous than maybe people think,” Mr Black replied.
“We have a whole process to leadership and culture, and a whole strategy for how we’re going to protect the culture of the firms that we’re acquiring and also bring them together and work collaboratively so that we become one law firm.
“We buy them into the group on day one and then we spend six months integrating them. Leadership and culture are very much part of the six-month integration programme.”
Mr Black was comfortable in the knowledge that, in time, Altier would look to sell BBS on. “There is very transparent communication between us,” he said. “We know that they’re on a journey to assist us growing, and if at some point along the journey, when we’re at £50-60m, they decide to exit and somebody else supports us to the next growth, then great.
“Their model is to invest in the people and improve the business and they believe that you’ll fetch a greater multiple on exit by doing it that way.”
Leave a Comment