By Tom Saunders
Private equity-backed legal services group Lawfront has resumed its acquisition drive, with member firms Fisher Jones Greenwood and Farleys completing tuck-in deals, acquiring Giles Wilson and Houldsworth Solicitors respectively. Lawfront has now made 18 acquisitions over the past five years.
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Axel Koelsch, chief operating officer at Lawfront, told Legal IT Insider that the acquisitions were funded through the firm’s acquisition facility, which Lawfront reportedly doubled in size following its refinancing in August 2026.
The seven firms in the Lawfront group have made 11 tuck-in acquisitions including the ones described above, bringing the group’s total revenue to a projected £175m. The acquisitions announced today (8 September) are the first since the appointment of new CEO, Peter Martin-Simon, who stepped into the role on 1st September 2026. Martin-Simon succeeds Neil Lloyd, who led Lawfront’s growth from under £10m in 2022 to over £130m by May 2025 and circa £170m revenue by the time of his departure, which Lawfront described as a planned retirement.
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“Our strategy is regional leaders, national scale,” Koelsch told Legal IT Insider. “We aim to position individual brands as leaders in their region… we look to acquire smaller firms and really bolster the market profile, depth of practice, and in some cases, breadth of practice.” For FJG, the acquisition deepens private client expertise and expands its reach into South Essex; for Farleys, it adds residential property and private client depth while extending its footprint further north.
Koelsch said Lawfront’s best-performing platform firms “double in size over three to five years” through a combination of organic growth and tuck-in acquisitions like the Giles Wilson and Houldsworth deals.
Lawfront says its accelerated growth is driven by its support for tech and AI adoption across group firms, investment in people, and the financial backing to complete further acquisitions. The group has already consolidated its firms onto shared cloud infrastructure, including NetDocuments as a group-wide document management system and AI marketplace Jylo as its shared AI platform. Lawfront is expected to announce further news about its AI investments in the coming weeks.
Koelsch said the model gives smaller firms a route to scale they could not achieve independently. “You can, as a small firm with a small ownership group, get stuck,” he said. “The path to scale from that size otherwise is simply not possible to achieve.”