Manchester-based personal injury law firm, Express Solicitors, has announced its best ever financial results, with group turnover reaching £27.4m.
Caseloads have grown despite the COVID 19 outbreak by 6.7% to 14,545.
Group turnover of Express Solicitors Limited and its sister company – medical reporting agency – Ontime Reports Limited grew by 29% from £21.3m in 2019 to £27.4m in 2020.
The pandemic brought on numerous challenges for the two companies. During the latter part of its trading year, the strength of the firm’s robust IT infrastructure has paid dividends during lockdown as 85% of staff were successfully working from home within 10 days of the lockdown being announced. Only 12% were furloughed and 3% remained in the office to deal with essential day to day business.
Express Solicitors has also followed this with 45 promotions right across the business including Jennifer Lutton and Seetal Sagar-Jhanji who have been promoted to Partners, bringing the Partnership up to 31. Head count has remained the same at 320 as the planned recruitment and training had to be put on hold from March onwards. The firm has a policy of promoting from within and is proud to carry on the tradition of bringing bright new talent through the ranks.
It has also promoted five Litigation Executives to Trainee Solicitors. The number of new cases has dropped in the past six months due to lockdown with a large proportion of the country furloughed and not attending work, and there has been a steep decline in the number of road traffic accidents and accidents at work. Some reports have shown a decrease of 60% in RTA cases and a 40% decrease in accidents at work during this time, this will impact the business in 12 to 36 months due to the nature of the cases as they conclude. In view of this Express Solicitors has uplifted the anticipated marketing spend by over £2m in the upcoming financial year in order to try to combat this with substantial investment in online marketing as well as the routes that it has used successfully over the past 20 years.
The firm has been approached by numerous firms and brokers of law firms who are looking to exit the Personal Injury market over the last six months, some of which it is pursuing and if successful will increase both turnover and caseloads help cement itself as one of the top firms in England and Wales, which specialises purely in Personal Injury.
Express Solicitors are ranked in The Lawyer Top 200, its lawyers and the firm are recognised in The Legal 500 and the firm is noted in Chambers and Partners. Express Solicitors specialises in personal injury and accident claims, clinical negligence claims and serious injury cases.
