‘We are pleased to have managed to grow our revenue’

ACTIVITY Client activity, and the need for legal services, remained pretty resilient over the last year. We are pleased to have managed to grow our revenue once again, which was positive as market conditions, especially for transactional areas, continued to be challenging due to external economic factors. In recent months we’ve seen increased transactional activity, which has been welcome. While M&A was lower last year, we still picked up sizeable mandates when they arose.

Our litigation, regulatory and investigations practices continue to perform strongly, as do most of our highly specialist practice areas. We have invested in our ESG & Sustainability practice which is of growing importance to our clients. Also, our ALG Solutions client

service delivery group is continuing to differentiate how we service clients and has been highly active, so investment in that group is key to our success.

AI We’ve been using AI technology for nearly a decade, and in February 2024 we announced our partnership with Harvey AI to use its generative AI platform specifically developed for professional service law firms. There are many capabilities that generative AI allows us to access for and with our clients, including document analysis, due diligence, litigation and regulatory compliance. The types of transactions our clients are undertaking, and the ever growing breadth of regulations they face, mean that we must offer our clients solutions that enable them to deal with such challenges.

OUTLOOK Confidence is certainly growing and we would hope for transactional activity to pick up as we move through 2024 and into 2025. With inflation easing and central banks globally indicating the likelihood of interest rates reducing later this year, our clients are expecting an improvement in business conditions. However, there are still uncertainties in the global outlook, and important elections coming up in the next 12 months could impact on the business environment or sentiment.