Anticipate
We look ahead at the opportunities and threats from changes in supply and demand, innovative technology and operational workflows.
Integrated advice for law firms navigating change
Adapt, evolve, transform
Recent developments in AI, new ownership models and market forces are changing how law firms work. Embracing that change requires a three-dimensional approach involving the firm's business, its people and its technology.
There is no single approach that fits every firm, particularly as they experience disruption to varying degrees and at different speeds. What is undeniable is that change is coming and needs to be addressed.
We are here to help.
What we do
Three dimensions; one firm
We work with you across the three key dimensions, helping your leadership team adapt the business, its people and its technology.
Business
People
Technology
Business
Strategic planning, business modelling and improving operational efficiency.
People
Optimising the firm's organisation and implementing internal change.
Technology
Maximising the value of technology, AI in particular.
How we work
Our team has significant expertise across all three key dimensions. We work alongside your leadership team to plan and implement the changes needed to meet disruption, whether from innovations in AI, new ownership models, new pricing or new ways of working.
We know leadership teams are also running the practice, looking after clients and often still fee-earning, so we take on as much of the heavy lifting as you need.
Formulate
We take stock of where your firm stands, set goals, and build a plan for how the organisation will change to meet them.
Navigate
We help you put the plan into practice, adapting as the market moves and handling the changes inside the firm.
About us
We have worked across the legal, strategy and AI sectors collectively for over 75 years. We saw disruption heading for the profession from a number of directions, and found that many firms were not ready for it.
Some are absorbed in questions of ownership after a wave of private equity activity. Many others are unsure which AI tools to choose, or what AI will do to their value proposition, their pricing and the way they are organised.
Few advisers cover all three dimensions for mid-sized firms. With genuine depth and breadth across business, people and technology, we felt well placed to help.
The firms that thrive will not just choose the right technology. They will also change how they work, how they are organised, and how they price and deliver their services.
Meet the team
Hands-on experience for real-life impact
We have been through disruption and transformation, from high-level strategy to hands-on change and the technology layer. Each of us works substantially across these dimensions.
Adam Davies
Partner
Adam has spent thirty-five years advising, sitting on and reporting to executive teams and their boards, much of it helping whole sectors navigate existential change: music licensing at the dawn of the internet, film's shift to streaming with LOVEFiLM and Amazon Prime, the reshaping of global university rankings, and AI-driven biodiversity risk for corporates and financial institutions. Most recently he has advised professional-services firms on AI-driven productivity and built new strategic frameworks for law firms facing the leadership and organisational challenges of the AI era.
Alongside the advisory work he has held multiple CEO roles, from building QS Consulting to leading Nature MRV, the first AI-driven biodiversity reporting platform. For over a decade his experience has been sought by leading business schools, including London Business School, UCL, Oxford and Imperial, where he has taught growth, leadership and entrepreneurship to more than 1,200 senior executives. He is a Sloan Fellow of London Business School and a practising solicitor, having qualified in 1995 and worked at City firms and as Head of Legal at listed PLCs.
Janaina Betteley
Partner
Janaina has spent twenty-five years building, scaling and leading businesses across Europe and Latin America, carrying full P&L and taking teams and operations from a standing start to scale. What sets her work apart is a rare combination: the commercial discipline of a partner and chief operating officer, together with a deep, evidence-based understanding of how leaders and teams actually adapt, adopt and sustain change. She grew Integration Consulting's European operation from foundation to more than £3m, led global accounts for L'Oréal, Diageo, Red Bull and J&J, and built its Global Transformation practice across more than eleven countries.
More recently she co-founded Unamano, applying behavioural science to trust and collaboration in teams, and served as chief operating officer of the fintech Serafin, leading its turnaround from a people-led business into a technology-enabled platform, embedding AI, Agile and OKRs. She holds a Sloan MSc in Strategy and Leadership from London Business School, where she was elected Student of the Year, with formal training in applied compassion at Stanford. She is the founder of reCompass, her platform for human-centred leadership and organisational transformation.
Tim Santos
Partner
Tim has spent seventeen years building artificial intelligence into real products, from research labs to enterprise platforms, turning cutting-edge machine learning into systems that work in production and at scale. He has been a research scientist, a lead data scientist, an MLOps engineer and a product director, so he understands both what the technology can do and what it takes to make it deliver inside a business. As founding Lead Data Scientist of Teradata's Big Data Centre of Excellence he delivered enterprise AI across telco, automotive, pharmaceutical and financial-services clients; at Samsung he patented an adaptive-streaming algorithm eventually deployed across millions of devices; and at EY, as Assistant Director for AI and MLOps, he built the MLOps platform for AI in Financial Services and advised major global banks.
He is the former Director of Product for AI Cloud and Developer Ecosystem at Graphcore, the pioneering UK AI-chip company valued at almost $3bn before its acquisition by SoftBank, where he worked at the frontier of AI, bringing state-of-the-art AI compute into large-scale production systems. He is also an advisor, investor and builder in the technology start-up ecosystem and has founded his own AI-infrastructure venture, so he knows the market for AI tools as a buyer, a backer and a builder, and can help firms tell durable products from passing hype. He holds a Master of Research in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence) from the University of Liverpool, is a Microsoft Certified Azure AI Engineer, and contributes to MLCommons' industry benchmarks for AI safety, training and inference.
Contact
If you have questions about adopting AI, changing ownership models, introducing new pricing, or adapting workflows and firm culture, or any other concern about how disruption may change the way you run your firm, please get in touch.
Our initial conversation is always free. Email us using the link below and tell us anything you think we should know. Naturally, we keep everything in strict confidence.