Nineteen years in law, from every seat at the table, and a firm built to be the adviser she could never hire.
Nineteen years in law. Risk and compliance roles inside firms including Trethowans, Lester Aldridge and Foot Anstey, then Head of Risk and Compliance at the consultancy Hive Risk, and now All Things Risk. A Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Legal Executives, a former Chair of Bournemouth & District CILEX, a Law Society contributor, and, somewhat to my own surprise, ranked among the top ten legal voices on LinkedIn.
Three seats at the same table: in-house, in practice, and consulting. It means I've been the person receiving the advice, the person the advice was about, and the person giving it. That changes how you give it.
I built this business as the buyer I used to be. In-house, when I needed external support, I kept hitting the same two problems. I was asked to pay for duplication, a pyramid where every layer re-checked the layer below, all of it on my invoice. And the retainers drifted, always, toward the lowest common denominator: generic advice that could have been sent to any firm, because it was.
What I actually wanted was someone who had been in the room. Senior enough to judge, close enough to care, and willing to do the work themselves rather than supervise it from a distance. I couldn't buy it, so I built it.
The obvious question about a one-person firm is what happens when I'm away. Here's the honest answer. I run deliberately small so it rarely arises: no more than two audits a month, a handful of retained clients, and every engagement scoped and documented in writing, so nothing about your firm lives only in my head. When I'm out, you know exactly when I'm back, and nothing falls into the gap between team members, because there is no gap and there are no team members. Firms lose more time to handovers inside big consultancies than they ever will to my fortnight in the sun.
And it's why the numbers tend to surprise people. A senior person who does the work herself costs less than you'd guess, because you're not paying for the pyramid: no juniors learning on your file, no account layer, no duplication of effort. The saving is in time, in never explaining the same thing twice, and in advice that's right the first time because the person who scoped it is the person doing it.
Being compliant is not enough, and being terrified of the regulator is not a strategy. Risk done properly supports growth; it doesn't apologise for itself. Fee earners who fight compliance are usually fighting bad compliance. And a consultant's job is to make a firm more capable and more confident, never more dependent, if a firm can't function without me, I've done the job badly.
No pitch, no jargon, nothing open-ended. Email eloise@itsallthingsrisk.com, find All Things Risk on LinkedIn, or start with a fifteen-minute call.
Let's talk