Welcome, everyone, to our half-year presentation. As usual, I'm joined by our CFO, Neil Smith, and our Acquisitions Director, Nick Smith. So let's go straight to slide five. I'm going to kick off by saying that we are really pleased with the group's trading performance in H1, with revenue up 9.3% versus H1 last year. 8.6% of that growth was organic, which is our best organic growth performance in any reporting period for three years. This would have been even stronger had activity not been impaired by inertia that baked into some of our clients' transactional pipelines as we progressed through Q2. This was a direct result of the macro uncertainty that permeated during the lead-up to the Autumn Budget. This is a material point from which we anticipate H2 will benefit as inertia lifts and activity that we expected to see in Q2 displaces to H2.
Our revenue growth is strongly disproportionate to our improved utilization, which was undoubtedly impaired by the transactional slowdown that I've just referred to, but utilization was still up 1% on prior year. At the end of the day, there are two main reasons for this strong revenue growth. Firstly, successful implementation of enhancements to our pricing and WIP to fees conversion processes, being a current-year strategy highlighted by us as such in our prior year-end presentation, and secondly, returns generated by some of our investments for growth made in prior periods. Now, down to the half-year point, our revenue growth has not yet generated margin progression.
This is largely due to some of our recent year's investments remaining a net cost in period as revenues from them continue to mature, and our ongoing investment in services, systems, and people, which we believe is essential for profit-enhancing growth moving forward, but from which returns are inevitably staggered. This ongoing investment contributed to our net debt outturn at the end of the period. However, our balance sheet remains strong, and measured investment of this nature is essential as a component of our profitable growth strategy. In the meantime, we continue to adhere to our commitment to return regular dividend to our shareholders in recommending an interim dividend of GBP 0.033, payable next March. Looking forward, we move into H2 positively.
Overall activity levels are good, in addition to which we anticipate that transactional services activity will return to at least the strong levels that we saw prior to the pre-Autumn Budget slowdown. And returns from some of our recent investments for growth will continue to mature into H2. And the already clearly evident return from successful implementation of improvements to our pricing and conversion policies will continue to flow into H2. Alongside this, we see some benefit in H2 from cost savings realized during H1, and we will continue to carefully monitor cost. These factors underpin our expectation that our full-year results will be in line with market consensus. Next slide, please.
This slide shows our H1 margin bridge, and I'm using it here to show how our H1 underlying operating margin landed and also to illustrate how some of our actions and investments are unwinding as we progress through this year and beyond. So in H1, we had a 2.4 percentage point drag on margin as a result of payroll increases that we saw as being necessary for those on payroll on 1st May. Generally, pay inflation in professional services has tempered versus the years immediately post-pandemic, but of course, the requirement for market-facing pay for our people remains an absolute necessity. The increased NICs imposed by the Autumn 2024 Budget impacted our H1 margin by 0.6 of a percentage point. In the fourth vertical on this slide, overhead inflation means increases in the cost of requisite non-personnel contracts carried over basis from the prior year into this year.
This impacted H1 margin by a 1.5 percentage point. Cost applicable to the fifth vertical on this slide is more discretionary in nature than cost in each of those to which I've just referred. As will be evident from the math on this slide, had we chosen not to incur this cost, we would have progressed our margin outturn. However, as mentioned by me earlier, investment in this vertical is essential to our growth ambitions, and returns from this investment are inevitably staggered. This fifth vertical represents the percentage impact on H1 margin of aggregate recent investment cost minus revenue generated from that cost. So examples of in-period investment include nine laterally hired partners and significant new investment in our offer to the Middle East from Dubai. We also made investments in people and systems to support and grow our services and to improve efficiencies.
Examples include adding revenue controllers to our finance team and recruiting a change director to support new system implementation and wider integration projects. Examples of investments made in prior periods that currently have cost ahead of revenue include investments in personnel for AI development and in our class actions business, Austen Hays, which has good momentum, but which was always going to be a longer-dated return for us. In summary, this vertical impacted margin by 4.2 percentage points. However, returns from our recent investments will continue to unwind into H2 and beyond. On the credit side of this bridge, the H1 increase in FINA activity contributed one percentage point to margin, and the H1 returns from investment in our pricing and WIP to fees conversion processes contributed 6.4 percentage points.
In practice, the vast majority of this material contribution was gained purely from adoption of direction given by market-leading management consultants in training to all of our senior leaders in legal services. This training has been refined to deploy more widely within group, but its value to legal services alone is a significant part of the 10.9% all organic revenue growth delivered by that part of our business and will be further enhanced by related software implementation in H2. So at this point, I'll hand over to Neil to run through the financials.
Next slide, please. And the next one. Thank you, Rod, for that introduction. So my section today covers the following areas: headline key financials, including a reminder of our dividend track record, a walkthrough of activity levels throughout the period, a H1 versus H2 comparison, platform numbers overview, and a cash flow and balance sheet summary. So let's move to the next slide, please. So this first slide lays out some of the key numbers in this morning's announcement. Activity levels are up 89% against 88% last year, as performance in more countercyclical service lines remains strong throughout H1, more than offsetting the lowering of transactional activity towards the end of this period. Our conversion of time into fees is up 6% and generated the majority of the revenue growth in this period. And as Rod's mentioned, our organic growth is the strongest we've seen for three years.
Our cost management remains tight, although both staff and overhead costs have increased slightly in H1 as a percentage of revenue. We expect this to normalize in H2 as we benefit from action already taken in cost management. The overall increase in staff costs as a percentage of revenue can be identified as a result of the increase in employers' National Insurance imposed by the UK government. Overhead costs as a percentage of revenue are more varied. The main contributing factor to their rise has come from additional IT costs and further investments made in systems. Therefore, our underlying operating profit margin declined in H1. This is as a result of this additional spend, but also the underlying performance coming out of the trends in activity as three of our four platforms declined margin in this period.
That is as a result of the mix of work in this period, the timing of investments made, and the absorption of further central costs, and the month six decline in transactional activity compared to the opposite trend in the previous year. The recent patient investments continue to build momentum and remain forecast to enhance margin in H2 alongside our already strong organic growth momentum. A good example of investment in this period that was not present in H1 last year is our expansion of our Dubai office. We enhanced the team right at the end of H2 last year, meaning H1 this year contained their cost and initial fees from a standing start, whereas H1 last year was unaffected by this investment decision. During H1, we refocused our processes on our pricing, WIP management, and conversion discipline that Rod has already highlighted.
Our staff have worked extremely hard on this initiative to find the right balance of value for both ourselves and our clients. Our focus on these areas was supported by the findings of PwC's latest legal services survey, which stated, "It's clear that those firms who best execute growth strategies, adopt innovative pricing, invest in partner development, and accelerate technology adoption will be best positioned to deliver sustainable performance." We have strategies to help us deliver on all of these initiatives. Moving further down the income statement, our underlying profit before tax margin declined as UK interest rates fell and our usage of debt increased. New additions to the income statement this period relate to our acquisition of Groom Wilkes & Wright. It has a little impact on the operating results thus far, as it was only acquired in early September.
In period, it produced circa GBP 600,000 worth of revenue, an underlying bargain purchase gain that is reducing non-underlying operating costs, and a cash outlay taken out of our revolving credit facility in September. It does come with a 30% EBITDA margin and historic revenues of GBP 4.7 million, and we have a two-year earn-out attached to this transaction. Overall, strong organic growth, sensible cost management, a H1 discipline in profits and margins as we invest and prepare ourselves for our typically profit and cash-generative H2 period. We're also pleased to maintain our interim dividend at GBP 0.033. Next slide, please. As I've indicated, our activity level has increased in this period. Our activity levels are our best indicator of client demand and whether we have appropriate staffing levels to meet that demand.
We carefully manage staffing levels and target circa 85% as a normal performance on average from our diversified group. Our group utilization during the six months was 89%, up from 88% in the first half of last year. This has been driven by greater countercyclical work streams increasing in period, with transactional work decreasing at the end of the period. However, I find it much more helpful to look at this on a rolling 12-month basis. Our utilization from this longer-term 12-month KPI is also 89% in the current year, but that is up from 85% seen in the 12 months to October last year. This therefore reflects that our utilization levels have been higher for longer, driving the organic growth I've mentioned and the enhancement of our results of managing out underutilized areas within the group.
The acceleration of transactional activity during last year's Autumn Budget can be seen to drive up the red previous year utilization trend. In contrast, reduced down slightly the current year's September to October utilization. The year-on-year movement in just a few months was significant on this trend line. Our strongest transactional-led platform, our Corporate Platform alone, saw activity fall 12% down to 77% in this period. We have a strong pipeline of work heading into H2, especially across dispute services and countercyclical areas of work like restructuring. Whilst predictions of a return to greater transactional activity are not easy, we are confident our balanced service lines and patient investments will contribute well in H2. Next slide, please. This slide highlights the position of H1 2026 against our current consensus targets for revenue and underlying operating profit.
Revenue delivered in H1 is already 49.8% of the current consensus revenue target compared to 48.1% the previous year. Revenue is not proven to be a problem as organic growth performance is strong. We're typically H2-weighted in terms of profit generation and revenue. We have a good track record of managing costs sensibly throughout the year, and we feel confident to emphasize we are on track with consensus despite the current drop in transactional activity we have seen. We have already mentioned some of the measures we've taken last year and in H1 this year to enable us to target H2 performance. Platform pipelines are good, with a number of invested-in areas predicting a strong organic H2, and as I mentioned earlier, GWW has made a great start, which will also help given its 30% historic margin track record. Next slide, please.
Briefly on this slide, as Rod's going to go into this more detail shortly, but visually you can see from the graphics that three of our four platforms increase revenue while three of our four platforms reduce segmental profit contribution. An unusual position for us to see from our results at H1, which highlights the significance of the shift we've seen between the two periods being compared in this presentation. Next slide, please. Debt increased during the period from GBP 19 million at the end of FY 2025 to GBP 30.2 million at the end of H1 2026. This is as a result of deploying GBP 4.8 million in respect of M&A activity, GBP 2 million in respect of service line investments, GBP 1.4 million of additional CapEx and system development costs, and GBP 3.3 million against our share recirculation strategy via funding to the EBT.
We have plenty of headroom in our 80 million RCF for further expansion, both organically and via acquisition. Of course, our focus remains on the sensible deployment of our cash in line with our capital allocation policy, our ability to generate sufficient cash in order to maintain our balance sheet strength and support our dividend. Cash generation in period has been a challenge as clients have had to adapt to changes in economic conditions, and our mix of work has lent itself towards areas where cash collection has taken longer. We should not underestimate the effects on client cash from tightening of belts due to NIC increases and the low U.K. growth. We have also outlaid a million pounds on a prepaid insurance policy to cover case-specific work and third-party costs in respect of class action activity. This will also have pushed up working capital.
I've felt a slight shift from client attitudes of late in debt collection. Debtor days have increased by six days since last half year. In addition, WIP days have increased by two days as the mix of work from lower transactional to increased contentious work types feeds through. Contentious work often takes longer to be billed. Despite all of this, we continue to evolve our processes. While often aligned to recovery of assets or deal timing in particular service lines, we do not have any additional concerns about the current increase in debtor days and our ability to reduce it in H2. At that point, I'll hand back to Rod.
Okay, thank you, Neil. Just moving on to the next slide, please. In the following four slides, I just want to give you some very brief insight into each of our four platforms.
Going straight to the next slide, which is our Business Services Platform. Just by way of a reminder, this platform houses most of our legal services dispute resolution teams alongside regulatory and intellectual property services, and that includes our three patent and trademark attorney consultancy businesses. On this platform, we're pleased to be able to point to 7.2% revenue growth. In legal services, our commercial litigation team grew its revenue by 9.2%, and it maintained really good momentum moving into H2. We saw 7.3% revenue growth from our international dispute resolution team, which is also carrying good momentum with some very large cases actually into H2. Our enhanced investment in this team commenced back in 2023, and it is ongoing with the in-period recruitment of another London-based partner to further build on our quality work in this space.
Our next planned step here is to recruit a dispute team into our repositioned legal services offer to the Middle East from our base in Dubai. Current mandates already sourced from that region are definitely helpful to our credentials for growth there. Our regulatory team had a strong H1, growing its revenue by 21.3% and continuing to benefit from regulatory changes across most sectors. In consultancy, while Adamson Jones and Symbiosis had a slower H1, our trademark attorney offer was significantly enhanced by our in-period acquisition of GWW, which Nick will pick up in a moment, but which I'm pleased to say is trading ahead of expectations. We also made some strategic recruitment onto this platform, which alongside carrying cost in our class actions business, Austen Hays, was adverse to the platform's H1 contribution margin.
However, we do remain confident of high-value returns from these investments in due course. So moving on to the next slide, our Corporate Platform. Revenue from this all legal services platform and mainly transactional services decreased versus H1 in prior year. That was a very small decrease, and it was absolutely due to the Q2 pre-Autumn Budget slowdown in transactional services activity, evidenced by the fact that the platform was well ahead of prior year down to that point. In that context, our corporate and tax teams had a good overall H1 and will benefit in H2 from anticipated returns to at least a business-as-usual transactional activity market as inertia eases in clients' pipelines. Our legal services banking team navigated strongly throughout H1, growing its revenue by just over 15%, 15.2%, as it benefited from prior year concentration on sourcing higher quality work.
Our restructuring advisory team had a slightly slower H1 but has a strong pipeline into H2 and has made a good start to the H2 period. Its H1 revenue shortfall aligned to the in-period investment in new senior people to both this team and to our corporate team, are factors in a reduction in contribution margin from this platform. However, we're confident that this will return to its historically strong position as transactional activity improves. Moving on to the next slide, the People Platform. Revenue from this platform also grew with a particularly strong contribution from our pensions team, which grew its revenue by 14.7%. This steady recurring quality revenue is important to the platform's overall resilience. Alongside pensions, our employment team had a good H1 and has a positive outlook into H2. Tailwinds include from the Employment Rights Bill, which continues to bounce around the legislative process.
Actually, in nature, this team, the employment team, is agnostic as to market conditions, benefiting from both transactional activity and distressed situations. In consultancy services, market conditions have been challenging for Gateley Transform because in the current climate, clients are slightly hesitant to commission leadership assessment, development, and cultural change projects. In this context, we're pleased with a relatively small drop in revenue from Transform, and we are absolutely encouraged by its track record of delivering in line at the end of every year. For historic reasons, our private client team had a poor H1, and restructuring that team remains a work in progress as a key part of repairing the platform's margin contribution. Moving on to the next slide, our fourth and final platform, the property platform.
This is by some margin our largest platform, and it had a strong H1, growing both its revenue and its margin contribution against a backdrop of ongoing challenging market conditions in commercial and residential real estate and actually in the construction sector. We're very pleased to be able to point to 14.3% all organic revenue growth derived from our market-leading position in some sectors and the overall resilience from the mix of services that we house on this platform. So we saw positive returns from some of our recent investments in services, including in residential development and construction legal services, which grew revenue by 24.9% and 27.8% respectively, and also from cost and project management services in our consultancy businesses, which helped to generate strong revenue growth in both Gateley Smithers Purslow and Gateley RJA.
Where appropriate, we also carefully managed churn in personnel on this platform and therefore related cost without adversely impacting revenue. Outlook from the platform into H2 is generally positive, with tailwinds of the nature referred to in this slide, including that the transactional teams on this platform will benefit from an easing of the inertia in clients' pipelines during the build-up to the Autumn Budget. This is a good point for me to pause and hand over to Nick to pick up our in-period acquisition of GWW. Nick.
Thanks, Rod. If we can move on to the next slide, please. The acquisition of GWW represents the continuation of our IPO strategy of measured diversification, but more specifically, also the latest step in our plan adopted in 2022 to build by acquisition a multifaceted IP professional services offering on our business services platform.
The first and second steps in that plan were the acquisitions of patent and trademark attorneys Adamson Jones and then Symbiosis, which were both acquired in 2022. Although both businesses are patent and trademark attorney businesses, the largest part of both is patent business. The acquisition of Symbiosis scaled and broadened out the AJ offering by adding life sciences-only patent services, a sector not previously covered by AJ. GWW scales our trademark-only business to circa £6.5 million of revenue by adding £4.7 million at a 30% corporatized PBT margin. In aggregate, IP consulting services now account for approximately £11 million of annual revenues. GWW was established over 20 years ago and has built an impressive roster of quality clients, including Molson Coors, abrdn, Neal's Yard, Nando's, many of whom have been clients of the business for many years.
In trademark business, we see a familiar pattern with the largest operations often forming part of the global bulge bracket integrated patent and trademark businesses, but with a relatively narrowly defined mid-market of mid-sized independent businesses. GBP 6.5 million of trademark revenues, with further profitable growth to come, sits us comfortably in the top half of that independent mid-market field, building relevance, as we define it, in securing and maintaining strategic customer accounts for the group. Our plan in intellectual property terms is to continue to scale and broaden our IP services offering. We've mapped the array of potentially relevant additional services such as licensing agencies, royalty audit, anti-counterfeiting, etc., and these will be a focus for origination going forward. As of today, in addition to IP legal services, in group, we can offer patent and trademark services, but also IP commercialization and valuation services.
In the meantime, pleasingly, early indications for GWW are positive, with a formal integration exercise underway and progressing well, and the business continuing to trade strongly ahead of forecast. Rod.
Thanks, Nick. Moving on to people and responsible business. So the next slide, please, and the one after that. Okay, so of course, our people remain our most valuable asset, and as always, I am truly grateful to them for their hard work and commitment. We continue to adopt a measured approach to resource while seeking to attract the best possible talent. Our group remains uniquely differentiated by the continuing growth in the consultancy services that sit alongside our long-established legal services. We now have 334 consultants within group, which represents a 3.7% increase on prior year. Deliberate management of churn did result in average fee and a headcount across the group reducing by 1.8%.
However, as mentioned by me earlier, we continue to invest in people for growth. This slide also references the in-period appointment of Jenny Goldie-Scot and Sunil Gadhia as non-executive directors. They really have hit the ground running and we're enjoying working with them. Looking slightly further forward, we will be welcoming John Paton to Gateley in January, and he will become our CFO on the 1st of May 2026, which completes our succession planning for Neil, who will be a very difficult act to follow, but who we are delighted will be staying with the group in roles from which we will benefit from his deep knowledge and understanding of our business.
Finally, by reference to this slide, we're really pleased to be able to report that we won 28 awards in the last 12 months, including in H1, the three high-profile awards that you can see listed towards the bottom of the slide. Okay, next slide, please. Responsible business. So as I consistently say, we absolutely recognize that business is an important catalyst for change, and therefore, being a responsible business is a deliberate component of our purpose statement, which you can see in yellow here on the slide. Our responsible business strategy is developed to positively impact the well-being of our employees and help unlock potential in the communities in which we're based. So I'm really proud of the progress that we've made since we launched our responsible business strategy back in October 2021.
That progress is measured, and the latest iteration of it is detailed in our fifth annual responsible business report, which we released on the 6th of August and which I would encourage you to read. The positives on this slide don't mean that we're complacent. Maintaining momentum is important, and we're certain that we can continue to enhance our community impact and make more meaningful progress in relation to the objectives that we've set to help our environment, so moving on, please, to the next slide, summary and outlook. In fact, the slide after that, please, so in summary, we're really pleased with our strong in-period, mainly organic revenue growth, and that was predominantly derived, as I said, from successful implementation of management initiatives that were presented at prior year-end and also evolving returns from recent investments made by us in line with our capital allocation policy.
So our in-period acquisition of GWW is also an encouraging step forward. It significantly enhances our trademark attorney offer and is trading ahead of expectations as we continue to build a diverse professional services business in line with our IPO strategy. As I've emphasized earlier in this presentation, we continue to invest for long-term profitable growth. Inevitably, these investments are delivering staggered returns. However, our near-term priority remains to achieve not less than 13.5% underlying operating profit margin. Looking forward into H2, we believe it will benefit from an anticipated return to at least business-as-usual transactional activity and from a full period of the progress made by us from our work in H1 on pricing and conversion processes enhanced by adoption during H2 of our investment in supporting software. We also expect to see further progression of returns from some of our recent investments.
Beyond H2, we firmly believe that strong outcomes will be derived from our more patient investment in the likes of the Middle East from our base in Dubai and in our class actions business and in AI development for internal and service delivery efficiencies. So we're confident in our strategy, and we are and remain optimistic in outlook. Thank you for listening to this presentation.