MFMac: Scottish legal giant with unfamiliar name sees revenues surge through £50 million

MFMac, created through the merger of Morton Fraser and MacRoberts, has posted 7 per cent year-on-year revenue growth in its first full year of trading as a combined entity.

Over the same period, Morton Fraser MacRoberts has increased its top-line profitability by almost 30 per cent to £19m. As a result, all staff will share in a firm-wide profit share pool of £1m.

The firm said it had made “significant” investments in people, infrastructure and technology in the last year. This included £3m in new premises - most notably a flagship office at Haymarket in Edinburgh - as well as upgrades to its Glasgow base to support “modern, flexible working”. The merged firm, created less than two years ago, employs almost 500 people across its offices in Edinburgh and Glasgow, including 70 partners.

Chief executive Chris Harte said: “The two primary reasons for our merger were to benefit clients and attract the best talent in Scotland. We are ahead of schedule against every benchmark we set, with the firm growing its turnover despite the costs and upheaval associated with merging.

“We can now push forwards on our journey to build a modern firm with the capability, scale and culture to compete at the very top of the legal market in Scotland - and to do it differently.

“We are delivering on our merger ambitions, winning the kind of mandates and attracting the kind of talent that shows we’re reshaping what independent law in Scotland can look like.”

The firm said it had also delivered an ambitious programme of IT projects to integrate the two businesses across operations, data and technology.

Bosses said that as a larger merged firm, it had won several major mandates it may not otherwise have won separately. These include advising the University of Edinburgh across its estates, HR and commercial operations, supporting Thistle Wind Partners (TWP), which is developing floating and fixed-foundation offshore wind capacity in Orkney and Aberdeenshire, and providing specialist legal support to SSE, including supporting its £10 billion infrastructure upgrades to the north of Scotland’s electricity network.