Chief Executive of Riverview Law

Business law firm

(Interviewed before it received its ABS license)

“Riverview Law came out of customers of AdviserPlus, which provides HR advisory outsourcing services, asking it to extend its HR model into legal services. We don’t think there’s anything really new or disruptive about what Riverview Law does. … It only looks disruptive from the perspective of the legal market, which is so unused to change.

We’re focused on the 60-70 percent of work that large organizations do every day of the week, every week of the year, that can be packaged into long-term contracts, such as commercial contracts and obligation management, litigation, HR, property. … We set up dedicated teams for each account to be sure that each team member truly knows the customer. We enter into long-term partnerships with our clients—agreements typically have a three-plus-year term, which gives us great visibility on earnings. We use effective end-to-end technology and workflow systems to enable our legal and support teams to work flexibly and efficiently. Our technology permits us to manage information and data, and helps us to provide business insight, to pre-empt risks and to reduce costs for our clients. We use the data to go back into the business and improve how the business operates. Our technology enables us to scale globally. …

This is a very exciting time, a phenomenal time, to be in the legal market. This is a moment when you can create something very special. The direction of the market is very clear, and there will be big winners as well as big losers. The biggest winners are the customers. For decades they have been paying far too much for legal services because they have not had a choice. Now they have a choice.

Ironically, the things that have protected lawyers in the past and allowed them to earn big unsustainable margins—regulation, myth, a cozy monopoly—are the same things that will prove their undoing because it’s created complacency. The longer the U.S. and other jurisdictions take to change their rules, the better it will be for U.K. companies like ours because it provides us with a window to build a competitive advantage.”