Stock exchange: Dwindling number of legal stocks
Law firm consolidator Knights was the best-performing listed legal business last year, with its share price leaping by 70% in 2025, the annual Legal Futures analysis of ‘Law PLC’ has revealed.
We have been tracking listed businesses with a strong legal services connection for several years although the cohort continues to shrink.
Our findings for 2025 come against the background of the FTSE 100 index ending the year up 21.5% – the best since 2009 – and the All-share index up nearly 20%.
All of the significant legal stocks are on AIM, whose All-share index rose by a more modest 6.5% in 2025, following falls in the previous two years.
After a couple of years where its share price ended much where it began, Knights jumped by 70% to 179p in the past 12 months – having even hit 210p in early October.
It is now back to the level at which the firm listed in June 2018 – it hit a high of 470p in autumn 2020 but then collapsed in the early months of 2022 and hit an all-time low of 64p in summer 2023.
Revenue at the consolidator was up 8% in its last financial year to £162m, with underlying profit before tax 11% higher at £28m, its annual results showed in September.
Reported profit before tax fell by £2.5m to £12.3m, primarily due to acquisition-related costs.
Knights completed two major acquisitions in the 12 months to 30 April 2025 – Thursfields and IBB Law – and has since announced three more: a £16.6m deal for Essex law firm Birkett Long, followed by 33-lawyer Sussex firm Rix & Kay and then small Cardiff firm Le Gros Solicitors to mark its entry into Wales. This was Knights’ 26th acquisition since listing.
Knights chief executive David Beech will be speaking at our Law Firm Growth Summit on 18 March in London.
Not for the first time, Keystone Law was a stand-out performer, with its share price up 7% to 626p in 2025, although it reached 700p during the year and is still far short of its all-time high of 865p in 2021.
Revenue was up 17% in the first half of its financial year and was likely to exceed market expectations for the full year.
In the six months to 31 July 2025, revenue reached £54m – with revenue per principal up 10% to £116,800 – and adjusted profit before tax leapt 20% to £7.3m.
Shares in Gateley – now past its 10th anniversary as the first listed law firm in the UK – have been slipping over the past four years and were down more sharply, by a quarter, in 2025, to 103.5p.
As before, there is no obvious reason for this as it has continued to perform well and diversify its offering by acquiring businesses offering complementary professional services, most recently intellectual property specialists Groom Wilkes & Wright, which it bought in September for an initial £5.7m.
Revenue for the six months to 31 October 2025 was up over 9% to £94m, with profits down a similar percentage to £9.5m.
NAHL – the legal marketing company that owns National Accident Helpline as well as alternative business structure National Accident Law – had a bad year, with its share price halving from 72p to 35p.
This was despite positive half-year results last September showing strong growth in profitability and cash generation, while also reducing net debt to a 10-year low.
It also revealed to Legal Futures tentative moves to expand National Accident Law into more serious injury cases.
Zigup was created in February 2020 through the merger of accident management firm Redde, which owned two alternative business structures – NewLaw and Principia Law – with light commercial vehicle hire business Northgate.
After three years of drifting downwards, its share price reversed course in 2025 and was up 19% to 383.5p.
Legal services form a small part of the group, whose 2024/25 turnover was £1.8bn – their most recent accounts, for 2024, showed NewLaw’s turnover at around £20m and Principia’s £6m.
NewLaw handles personal injury claims and Principia Law advises victims of non-fault road traffic accidents on recovering vehicle credit hire and repair costs.
Zigup’s full-year results in 2025 included £13m in “exceptional administrative expenses” after it decided to exit the personal injury market “as it no longer provides attractive returns”.
Zigup described the NewLaw business as “not core to the mobility solutions provided to customers across the group and been operating in a challenging environment since regulatory reforms were put in place in this market in 2021”. This refers to the previous government’s whiplash reforms.
It went on: “Exiting the market will allow greater focus on the core operations of the group and ensure that capital is allocated optimally. No new business has been accepted, and existing cases have been put into a managed run off.
“The exceptional items relate to impairments of assets that have arisen due to the decision to unwind the trade of the business over the shortest time possible whilst remaining compliant with regulatory obligations.”
A newcomer to our analysis is professional services business DSW Capital. It owns a network of finance and accountancy firms under the Dow Schofield Watts brand and entered the legal market in late 2024 with a £6.1m deal for Surrey firm DR Solicitors.
The group’s chief executive told Legal Futures recently that growing the legal arm was a big priority.
A trading update in November said DSW’s revenue increased by 32% to £10.3m in the six months to 30 September, driven by the acquisition of DR and growth within existing DSW licensee businesses.
Despite downward fluctuations during the year, the share price ended 2025 at 66.5p, much where it began.
Away from law firms, the world’s biggest litigation funder, Burford Capital, saw its share price drop 36% to 666p, having been as high as 1343p in September 2023.
But that still compares favourably with fellow funder Litigation Capital Management, which has collapsed from 100p to finish 2025 on 7.6p. The shares crashed in October after the number of cases LCM had lost meant there was “a material uncertainty in relation to our going concern status”.
It began a strategic review, which is ongoing, the options arising from which will be benchmarked against a lean run-off operating model.
insolvency funder Manolete Partners continued to drop, ending 2025 down a third from the start at 58p – although it did spike at 117p in September.
From an all-time high of 565p in May 2020, Covid (and the moratorium on insolvencies) hit the business hard later that year and it has fallen steadily since.
Its half-year results to 30 September 20205 showed a 12% dip in revenue to £13m but that it had received a record 505 new case enquiries in that time and had 446 live cases in progress.
The six months saw a record 146 case completions – nine more than the same period in the previous year – although they were at a lower average value. They included the partial completion of the 22 truck cartel cases Manolete is backing, for which it received £3.2m.
The company’s board – which again decided not to pay an interim dividend – said it “remains confident in the prospects for the business, expecting a return to higher average settlement values in the second half of the year and total realised revenues (excluding the cartel settlement) being weighted towards the second half”.
Frenkel Topping, whose stated strategy is to build a full-service offering to personal injury and clinical negligence claimants short of actual legal advice, saw its share price rise by 6p in the year to 48.5p, but it is set to delist once the final stages of the takeover by Harwood Private Equity are completed.
Anexo Group, which combines a credit hire business and personal injury law firm Bond Turner, delisted in September after the lawyer couple behind it – barrister Alan Sellers the group’s executive chair, and Samantha Moss, managing director of Bond Turner – joined forces with its largest single investor, Isle of Man-regulated DBAY Advisors, to take it private.
Shareholders were told that the group’s listing has not delivered the benefits – such as access to additional capital to support growth – that had been hoped for when it went public in 2018.
Listed business RBG Holdings – which owned London law firms Rosenblatt and Memery Crystal – was wound down in early 2025 after failing to appoint an administrator.
At the end of January, RBG said it had “regrettably” filed a notice of intention to appoint administrators in the wake of the departure of its contentious arm, Rosenblatt, to a new law firm set up by founder Ian Rosenblatt. It was set to delist as a result.
It all followed a stand-off between Mr Rosenblatt and the board of RBG after a period of financial instability, with falling turnover and losses, that led to the group retrenching into core legal services.
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