Jaggard: Operational focus
Taylor Rose has become the first law firm with more than 1,000 consultants on its books as its chief executive says there is still plenty of room to grow its hybrid model.
The national law firm is unique for a practice of its size in having both employed lawyers and consultants.
At the end of 2025, AIIC – the group of which Taylor Rose is part – had 1,485 consultants in all, including 1,009 fee‑earners. The remainder are support staff employed by those consultants.
Around 80 of the consultants work in Kingsley Wood, a standalone corporate-focused fee-share practice, and 35 in FDR Law, a specialist property law firm for self-employed consultants launched in August 2024 [1].
Taylor Rose’s employed staff number around 600.
Chief executive Adrian Jaggard said that while he was committed to the hybrid model, the only way the employed side could keep up with the growth of the consultancy arm was through mergers and acquisitions – which have featured heavily in the history of Taylor Rose and to which he hinted the firm could return later this year.
He attributed much of the 25% increase in turnover for the last financial year, along with 60% in EBITDA, to increasing the number of consultants as well as improving revenue per lawyer.
He would not give the actual figures ahead of publication of AIIC’s accounts soon, but in the year to 30 September 2024, the group recorded a turnover of £97m and EBITDA of £7.8m, with net profit of £3.5m.
Mr Jaggard said that despite the huge growth of consultant-led firms in recent years, they were “nowhere near the ceiling”, given there were 170,000 practising solicitors. Between the four biggest – Taylor Rose, Setfords, Keystone and gunnercooke – there were no more than 3-4,000 consultants, he pointed out.
At the same time, he acknowledged the concern that consultant firms cream off experienced lawyers from traditional practices – but also rely on those same firms to train up the next generation.
“It’s not going to be a problem for a long time to come because it’s [still] a tiny proportion of the profession.”
He added that the employed arm of Taylor Rose has trainee solicitors and solicitor apprentices.
Taylor Rose has previously investigated a stock market listing and Mr Jaggard said he now received approaches from private equity houses every month.
“We are privately held – we’ve got a very narrow group of shareholders – and I think at some point we would need to recognise that those changes [in the market] around us are putting a lot of pressure on us. And whether it’s PE or IPO, that could be an option for us, for sure, at some point.”
He explained that a key reason Taylor Rose has not been on the acquisition trail itself of late was because of a focus on operations.
It has “rationalised” its offices – from 40 to 20 – and practice areas [2], and is in the process of moving the whole firm onto Salesforce, partnered with NetDocs and Office365 – by September, he said, “we will be entirely cloud-based. So we will not have one single server. We’re closing down 300 servers at the moment”.
Taylor Rose’s IT budget this year is just over £16m and its use of artificial intelligence (AI) has so far also been limited to operational matters, such as financial transactions being reconciled and allocated and all post scanned and then “auto-allocated” to matters.
Mr Jaggard highlighted too how the firm used Slack as an interface layer and that taps into Salesforce, OneDrive, the company handbook and various other sources. It allows him simply to say into his phone ‘How many quotes have we given today?’, ‘Can you wear Crocs in the office?’ or ‘How do I deal with a politically exposed person’, and it gives him the answer.
The next step with AI will be using it to augment legal services – Mr Jaggard predicted that “this will be the highest impact area” – and the management is going through a selection process with leading suppliers at the moment.
The third use, in time, will be communication via AI agents, meaning that consultant lawyers who need IT support engage with an AI agent instead of a member of the help desk. “I think also the time will come when society accepts or expects that you can speak to an AI agent for call routing, switchboards, that sort of thing.
“We’ve got all that parked at the moment, and I know others are going down that road already, but I do think the day will come near where it won’t be frowned upon and it won’t be a challenge for customers or seen as a problem. It will be part of our operational ecosystem.”