The date is looming when I will pass the age at which my uncle retired. Oh, lucky Boomer – fat final salary pension scheme, you see.
I’ve got at least another 15 years to go (all being well). Who knows, perhaps in the legal press or possibly on the tills at Aldi. But I am already at the stage of mulling the performance of the pension investments that will need to keep me in Werther’s Original.
What I won’t be doing, the Gazette can exclusively reveal, is buying a stake in listed law firms. Actually I can’t anyway, for ethical reasons, as a journalist who writes about this stuff. But bear with me.
‘Volatile’ hardly covers this micro-sector of the London Stock Exchange. My back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that the share price of the quoted sextet has slumped by more than half, on average, in the last 12 months. That’s far more than any share index you’d care to mention.
This week has been yet another turbulent one. One listed firm, Rosenblatt, sacked its CEO while another, Ince, delayed its financial results yet again.
So is a stockmarket listing looking like a dead letter for legal practices?
Not so fast. The ‘LexIndex’ – if I can call it that – is very small. Surely too small to allow for generalisation.
Gateley, which went to market first, is motoring along nicely for example. ‘No fireworks, but Gateley has consistently performed,’ is the verdict of Tony Williams, principal of legal consultancy Jomati and a former managing partner at Clifford Chance.
Keystone has done passably well, but Williams notes that it has a very different business model from a traditional law firm and it would be unwise to infer too much. Knights, meanwhile, has bounced back a bit from the mauling it received from investors in the wake of a 2022 profit warning.
Jeff Zindani, a legal sector M&A broker, and Williams both told me they do not expect any legal IPOs in the near future, with the market subdued. But arguments for going public – to cash out, or raise money to diversify, perhaps – are not going away.
‘There’s a pause in the market,’ Zindani observes. No more than that.
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