Keystone Law Group has raised £15m to float on the AIM London Stock Exchange, with a key factor in its oversubscribed listing said to be that it operates in “a significant addressable market, ripe for disruption” and that it already has the necessary infrastructure, including IT.
The dispersed model law firm, which becomes the third to float after Gordon Dadds and Gateley, today (16 November) announced its intention to float on AIM following a successful fundraising, which was “significantly oversubscribed.”
The announcement highlights the fact that the UK legal services mid-market, which has an annual revenue of £8.8bn, is ripe for disruption and says “all types of legal work…are capable of being delivered by lawyers within the Keystone model.”
Keystone’s lawyers are self-employed, work from their own offices and have no fixed salary. The announcement says: “A scaleable, proven business model which has demonstrated a history of growth: Keystone already has the necessary infrastructure, including IT, developed and deployed with capacity to support substantially higher lawyer numbers without significantly increasing the working capital requirements of the group.”
Keystone in 2015 became one of the early adopters of NetDocuments’ cloud-based document management system, led by IT director Maurice Tunney.
It’s practice management system is Tikit P4W, which is more typically used within the second half of the Legal IT Insider Top 200 of UK firms and below, although it is also in use at Tikit’s parent company, telecoms giant BT.
However, Keystone’s fee-earners live in the firm’s portal Keyed-In, relaunched six weeks ago after a bottom up rebuild using an external development agency. The PHP-based portal helps automate much of the work that Keystone fee-earners need to do, including integrating with NetDocuments, electronic signature software Signable, and Companies House.
Keystone will be admitted to AIM at 8am on 27 November under the ticker KEYS.
