A Scottish law firm has reported revenues rising 47% this year and projected this figure to more than double by 2025.
Glasgow-headquartered Complete Clarity Solicitors and Simplicity Legal posted annual turnover of £1.5m during the year to May 2023, up from £1.1m the previous year.
With profitability levels higher than budgeted, the firm has now redistributed this among staff via salary increases.
This is in addition to the introduction of a £50,000 bonus pot, resulting in a £2,300 pay-day addition for each colleague.
The firm has also boosted its headcount to 25, including 12 qualified solicitors and three trainee solicitors, alongside a four-strong client services team.
Founded in 2010, Complete Clarity owns Simplicity Legal, which it established in 2015 with the aim of filling a gap in the market for fixed fee family law work, and merged with in 2017.
Billy Smith, director of both, said: “The firm has been performing well in excess of expectation, driven by the culture which we have consciously developed in recent years and also by structural changes to our commercial activities.
“I have learned from experience not to fall into the trap of lawyers who tend to forget that they have clients, but to focus on giving advice which is firmly based on commercial and economic good sense.”
Complete Clarity has established a system of attracting new staff from non-traditional routes, typically hiring diploma students and bringing them on to be legal assistants, then trainees, before qualifying as solicitors. It has some lateral hires, but most practising staff have come through the firm’s bespoke recruitment process.
Staff are divided into teams, tasked with contributing to the commercial viability of the firm. Three are made up of lawyers and the fourth is the client services team, which responds to phone, email and contact request enquiries. This team a target response time of 15 minutes, which Smith said has not only secured significant new business, but has also been crucial to recent performance success.
The second contributory element has been Clarity’s decision to outsource its fee processing and client relationship management to legal case management software firm Denovo Business Intelligence. It bills on a directly-created time and line basis, giving greater transparency for staff and clients than the previous system of using a law accountant.
Smith added: “It has always been our ambition to encourage our staff to be the best version of themselves, allowing us to design a legal service which is very simple, but very valuable to our clients – a fresh, but always professional method of solving legal problems.
“I am delighted that the firm has reached its target of £1.5m in fee income this year and, if it is not posting £2.5m by 2025, I will consider that to be a failure.”
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