Harper James the scale-up: new hires and strong year end results

Walking the same path as many of our clients by sharing their desire for growth has long been a reassuring aspect of the support we provide – we share the same entrepreneurial spirit and understand the challenges of moving a business forward in the real world.

Over the last 12 months Harper James transitioned into a scale-up phase as we put in place the framework to facilitate our ambitious goal; to reach £20M revenue in the next four years from organic growth alone.

We’re delighted to share news that this year has been a significant step towards realising our goal by closing out our financial year with an increase in revenue of 37%. We’ve also grown our number of staff by 41% across the business and recently, we appointed our 100^th employee.

Adding to the ten lawyers appointed between January and April 2022, a further 12 senior appointments have been made which firmly strengthen the capabilities of our Commercial, Commercial Dispute Resolution, Commercial Property, Corporate, Employment, Equity Incentives and Financial Services offerings. We have also made the strategic move of hiring Head of Revenue Operations, Dani Conlon, who will head up this new function to support our rapidly scaling growth and ensure exceptional prospect onboarding and client experiences.

Key solicitor hires include:

Commercial

• Caroline Trasler – Senior Commercial Solicitor, who has 20+ years’ experience and specialises in franchise agreements, business contracts and early-stage commercial support for new and smaller businesses.
• Kevin Manship - Senior Commercial Solicitor, who has 20+ years’ experience, including at a top 50 law firm and at numerous client secondments as an in-house legal resource into multi-disciplinary teams involved in the procurement of large-scale IT, technology, and infrastructure projects.
• Liz Appleyard - Senior Commercial Solicitor, who brings 30+ years’ experience working in private practice assisting clients trading both nationally and internationally, on a B2B and B2C basis, with an extensive range of commercial issues and agreements.

Commercial Litigation

• Charlotte Peel – Senior Commercial Litigation Solicitor, who has worked for a range of clients from start-ups to global FTSE 100 firms and has experience in all forms of alternative dispute resolution and particular interest in director/shareholder disputes and matters involving contractual issues.
• Liz Black - Senior Commercial Litigation Solicitor, who has 20+ years’ experience, including heading-up a dispute resolution practice for six years. She advises businesses of varying sizes on dispute evaluation and resolution by litigation, negotiation, mediation, or other alternative dispute resolution process.

Commercial Property

• Genevieve Stevenson - Commercial Property Solicitor, who joins from a Top 50 law firm and has experience in dealing with a wide variety of commercial property situations including landlord and tenant matters and sales and purchases.
• Rachel Jones - Senior Commercial Property Solicitor, who has 20+ years’ experience in property and brings extensive experience in dealing with the full range of property matters, including financing, sale and purchase, landlord and tenant matters as well as development work.

Corporate

• Baljit Chohan - Corporate Partner, who has 30+ years’ during which he has headed corporate teams and advised businesses from high growth start-ups to FTSE 100 (and international equivalent) in their M&A strategy, execution, fundraisings and joint ventures.
• Phillipa Carson - Corporate Solicitor, who has 12+ years’ experience who brings experience from working at Top 20 law firm and in-house in industry for a global business in Hong Kong.
• Tristan Johnston - Equity Incentives Solicitor, who advises on employee incentives arrangements, share incentive plans, manager equity arrangements and is experienced with a wide range of venture capital, M&A transactions, and other corporate advisory matters.

Employment

• Lisa Moore - Employment Solicitor, who has 10+ years’ experience representing SMEs (including many international clients) along with senior executives on a wide range of employment issues, including commercial disputes with a particular focus on employment related contractual issues.

Financial Services

• Indraneel Basu Majumdar - Senior Financial Services Solicitor, who has 20+ years’ experience as a corporate finance lawyer, including in-house and most recently at JP Morgan. He has a wide range of regulatory and transactional experience spanning payment services, cash management and treasury services, digitalisation and tokenisation.

Commenting on our progress, Founder & CEO Toby Harper says:

Surpassing our 100^th member of staff is a big milestone for us and a proud moment when I reflect on the days when I started the firm in my living room and hired my first team members.

‘I continue to be impressed by the calibre of hires we’re able to attract, which in turn means that we’re able to continue delivering an exceptional service for our clients. The fact that we’ve been able to recruit in such a difficult market and seen a growth of 41% in staff this financial year coupled with a remarkably low attrition rate fills me with confidence that we must be doing something right! While our team is expanding at rapid speed, we are taking conscious steps to ensure that our strong firm culture and ethos is preserved.

‘The financial growth and strong pipeline of work and new clients we’re seeing provide a strong indication that we will be able to realise our ambitions to scale and become the leading national law firm for entrepreneurial businesses.

Our ultimate goal is to deliver exceptional value and legal advice from experienced and talented solicitors in order to support more businesses in their growth journey.

We’re a team of remote-working solicitors and the use of technology coupled with unique price plans enables us to provide accessible and cost-effective business legal services without compromising on quality. Key to delivering our high-quality legal support is the exceptional experience of our solicitors. Almost all our lawyers have previously worked for a top 100 UK law firm or in-house at large international businesses. Find out more about our team or, if you’d like to be part of our journey check out our current vacancies.