CEO of Radiant Law
Transactional law and managed legal services
(Interviewed before it received its ABS license)
“I was partner at Latham and increasingly frustrated by the gap that I perceived between what clients needed from us and what I was actually able to do in that environment. I ended up writing a memo for the executive committee of Latham & Watkins. In the memo, I gave my analysis of the market and what changes were coming, and described the things that I thought Latham & Watkins could benefit from doing. That memo did not go anywhere, and I look back at my hopes for engagement as wonderfully naive!
I had never really thought of starting a law firm, but I ended up in a conversation with a friend of mine in New York about setting up their London branch. While that did not work out, it planted the idea in my head that you could actually set up a law firm. As I looked around the market and talked to people, I realized that the issues I raised in the memo were not Latham & Watkins issues; they were marketwide issues.
So there we were: five transactional, outsourcing tech lawyers. Our basic premise at the beginning was that clients want the judgment calls and the experience, so we would just be senior lawyers. … We sent our junior work to an LPO. We progressively used technology, not just off-the-shelf systems, but our own stuff that we developed for ourselves. …
All this set us on a journey that we are still on. We restructured ourselves as a real company with a CEO and executive positions, moved to salaries and bonuses instead of the traditional model of pulling money out at the end of the year. And we clarified our vision and strategy, with an absolute focus on creating business value by helping companies create great relationships through their commercial contracts. That simplification and clarification—of structure, of roles, of mission—became liberating, because it became obvious what we needed to do next. …
The current regulatory environment in the U.K. is very potent. It is outward-looking, from the U.K. to the rest of the world. Things can happen that can’t happen for U.S. firms, like external funding, and it makes it easier to bring different experts into management. … It would be a mistake for the U.S. to wait to see the final results before it even starts its own journey. It’s not that the legal market can’t evolve in the U.S. without the ABS structure; it can, of course. But the confluence of things happening in the U.K. makes it a much more dynamic and competitive market, and it will produce players that will be very potent, not just for the U.S. but on the global stage.”
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