Hall Brown Family Law has built something rare in the UK legal market: a specialist family law firm that has grown from a standing start to one of the most respected practices in its field. And they’ve done so entirely on the strength of its reputation, bringing in top talent across the UK and delivering best-in-class client experience. 

Founded by partners Sam Hall and James Brown, the firm has expanded from its Manchester base to six offices, grown its headcount to around 80 people, and been recognised as one of the Sunday Times Top 10 Best Places to Work two years running. It wins its work through referrals including from wealth managers, barristers, tax advisers, and even from opposing counsel. That’s not a marketing strategy. It’s a culture built on delivering excellent client experience.

But growth at that pace, and with that level of ambition, demands more than great lawyers. It demands operational and technology infrastructure that can help the firm to manage risk effectively, to onboard new clients quickly and to enable fast collections. That was the advantage that Legl brought to the firm, with CFO / COO Will Taylor commenting, “we needed to build a platform where our lawyers could go out and be fantastic at their jobs, whilst knowing that everything behind them was working. That’s what Legl gave us.”

One platform for seamless onboarding, AML compliance and payments

Before Legl, onboarding a new client at Hall Brown meant fee-earners were filling in lots of forms manually and dealing with some friction in back-and-forth processes with clients. There was a lack of visibility across all clients of the firm from a compliance perspective which made things tricky as the firm really started to scale. Legl brought the holistic oversight that all law firms need.

Legl was introduced in the firm in 2021, initially to help to accelerate payment times by giving clients quick and simple routes to make payments, e.g. ApplePay. This helped the firm to achieve an impressive reduction in the average payment times. 

But there were further opportunities to leverage Legl’s technology to help to manage clients across their lifecycle, encompassing onboarding and compliance workflows. Will Taylor sought to centralize, remove complexity from processes and further enhance the firm’s stance on delivering a digital client experience. 

With Legl, all end-to-end client onboarding and compliance workflows  run through one system. From client engagement letters, ID verification, KYC checks, PEPs and sanctions screening, Risk Assessments - all of it flows through Legl’s client lifecycle management platform. And it creates a fast, firm-branded digital experience that clients complete in minutes for processes like paying invoices or completing onboarding. The results speak for themselves: it takes the average Hall Brown client just 7 minutes 10 seconds to complete the full onboarding process, including identity verification and document signing.

That matters for a firm whose entire growth model is built on referrals. When clients talk about Hall Brown to a wealth manager, a tax adviser, or a friend going through a difficult family law matter, they’re reflecting on the quality of the legal work, but they’re also reflecting on every interaction they had with the firm. A simple, professional and digital experience that takes just a few minutes sets the tone from day one.

“The change for our lawyers and for our support team has been significant,” says Will. “They used to be responsible for chasing down four separate documents, manually checking whether things had come back, following up with clients themselves. Now they use Legl to manage the process from end-to-end. The client journey is simple, and the experience for lawyers is equally as simple. Support staff can see exactly where things are in our client onboarding workflow. Important AML compliance considerations are tracked automatically with full audit trails for us to access at any time. It’s a completely different experience, both for us internally at Hall Brown and for the client.”

Across Hall Brown’s 80 Legl users, the platform is deeply embedded in daily operations. Support teams run hundreds of risk assessments each month. The accounts team processes client payments at scale. Fee earners engage clients digitally from the moment a matter opens.

Getting paid faster, with less friction

Collections have historically been one of the most uncomfortable parts of running a law firm. Chasing clients, particularly in family law, where relationships are emotionally charged, is time-consuming, awkward, and a distraction from fee-earning work.

Payments with Legl has changed that dynamic for Hall Brown. Payment request links are sent  out as part of the firm-branded client journey, making it easy for clients to pay on account at a time that suits them without the risk or back-and-forth of other payment methods. The numbers showcase the impact of giving clients a fast and easy payment route: the average time from a Legl payment request being sent to payment being made is just 3 hours 24 minutes. And because the experience is genuinely frictionless, a significant proportion of Hall Brown’s clients make payments outside of office hours, at evenings and weekends, on their schedule, not the firm’s.

“Cash flow matters in any business, and a law firm is no different,” Will says. “Legl has taken the friction out of client payments. Clients can use a simple, professional experience that fits around their lives, and is available 24/7. That’s an important part of delivering a great experience, and it provides critical value to the firm by helping us to get paid quickly for the services we have delivered.”

The impact isn’t just operational. When a client can onboard in under eight minutes and pay within hours of receiving a request, that experience reinforces the firm’s reputation. In a market built entirely on word-of-mouth referrals, every touchpoint either adds to that reputation or detracts from it. Legl helps the firm to ensure the operational side always adds to it.

Compliance infrastructure that gives management teams confidence and visibility

Hall Brown’s clients include some of the most high-profile individuals in the UK. The firm takes a serious approach to compliance and the firm management are actively involved in using Legl to understand more about the firm’s client base and risk.

For example, Will uses Legl’s risk and compliance dashboard for exception reporting: identifying overseas clients, flagging high-risk matters, spotting CCJ holders early. Will comments, “it’s not about monitoring every transaction daily. It’s about having the visibility to catch problems before they become serious, and the audit trail to demonstrate that the firm’s processes are robust when regulators ask. It’s about ‘exception reporting’ and not ‘everything reporting’”. 

“We work with very high-profile clients and the reputational stakes are enormous,” Will explains. “Legl gives me a dashboard view across the whole firm. I can see immediately if there are flagged matters that need partner-level attention, high-risk overseas clients, or instances where further due diligence may be required. Legl makes this kind of top-line visibility simple for the management team.”

Now the firm uses Legl’s entire client lifecycle management platform, including risk assessments and other features that support more effective internal processes and compliance workflows, the firm has the right foundation for growth. Scaling across new offices, new teams of lawyers, and new clients is simple when the process is consistent and there’s the right level of visibility across the firm. 

Protecting fee earners from admin

One of Will’s core principles is that fee earners shouldn’t be burdened by administrative work. Every hour a lawyer spends chasing documents or manually managing onboarding is an hour not spent on client work. At a firm that wins business entirely through reputation and relationships, that matters enormously.

Legl is central to reducing that burden. Risk assessments that once required a high level of manually engagement are now simplified in Legl where information is auto-populated and risk scores can be generated based on the firm’s policies. Client engagement letters go out digitally as part of the onboarding process. Invoices are collected quickly through the use of payment requests.

“My view is simple: if a lawyer is spending time on admin that a well-designed system could handle, we’re leaving money on the table,” Will says. “Legl has materially reduced the administrative burden on our lawyers. They can focus on the brilliant work they do for clients whilst being confident that our robust approach to risk and compliance is being met every time. I am also confident that, in time, with further AI involvement in the Legl tools the administrative burden will reduce further.”

Will comments that one of the advantages of working with Legl is that there is a, “genuine approach to partnership and working collaboratively with our firm on product development and priorities.” Hall Brown has been actively involved in shaping features and feeding back on what works to the Legl team, the most recent example of this being with Risk Assessments, which the firm has rolled out fully across all staff. “What I’ve appreciated about Legl is that we’re not just seen as another customer,” Will adds. “We’ve been able to talk directly to product specialists and tech teams to feed into further development of Legl’s platform. Legl want to listen to their customers and they can then react and develop their product quickly to deliver on client needs.  For a firm like ours that’s thinking carefully about where we want to go, this gives us great confidence as we scale the firm.”

Built for the next chapter

Hall Brown turns ten years old in April 2026. In a decade, it has grown from a two-partner startup to a multi-office firm recognised as one of the best places to work in the UK, serving some of the country’s most prominent individuals through some of the most difficult periods of their lives.

The next chapter is about consolidating that growth and going further. Hall Brown’s ambition is to add more offices over the next five years - not through aggressive expansion for its own sake, but by finding the right people in the right cities and building long-term relationships before they even join. The firm recruits based on the person, not the postcode.

To keep building on the firm’s huge success, the operational foundation has to be right, and the firm are confident that with Legl they can grow whilst maintaining a robust approach to compliance and keeping a great cash flow position. Will comments “finance, compliance, HR, technology all needs to work without creating friction for the fee earners or the clients. We’ve made many changes to our operational infrastructure and Legl has been a great success story at our firm.”