Who he?

I only really imagined that this Blog would be seen by people who already know who I am; but if you have wandered here by accident here is an introduction. I was born in Stratford upon Avon, and raised in Glasgow, Whitley Bay and - mostly - Henley on Thames. I did a law degree at the University of Sussex - class of 1977. At that time Sussex had a principal that you had to spend half your time doing courses that bore little or no relation to your major subject; a brilliant idea that all degree courses should adopt. So, apart from law, I also spent time studying a range of other subjects including Epistemology, Sociology, and Computing. I think I was the first person ever to combine the study of computers and law.

For my computer course I wrote a natural language query program in POP2 that allowed a person to interrogate a geographical database using plain English. You could ask it "Which countries have major automotive industries?" It would deconstruct the sentence, throw away the 'noise' words, run a DB query, identify the results, and then formulate a grammatically correct response, "The United States, the United Kingdom and Germany have major automotive industries". I say 'response', given the timeshare usage method of the computer departments ICL1900 at the time, you actually left a pile of punched cards in a pigeon hole on Tuesday and got the answer back on Friday. Nevertheless, it worked. My computer professor told me it was a complete waste of time as "in the future all people will know how to program". I got a low mark as a result. This was a fledgling Siri/Alexa - in 1975.

I then then read for the bar in London and was a pupil barrister at 3 Hare Court under the 'tutelage' of the Robert Flach QC - undoubtedly one of the role models for Rumpole of the Bailey. I ran out of money and was invited by my bank manager to "get a proper job". Only days later I saw a job for a lawyer "with some experience of computers" at a place called Butterworth Telepublishing Ltd. This was a brand new subsidiary of Butterworth Publishers, then one of the largest legal publishers in the UK, which had a cross-licensing agreement with Mead Data Central in Ohio - in return for access to UK case law to load onto their Lexis database, MDC would allow BTL to sell and support Lexis in the UK. In 1980 I was hired as the 'Customer Support Manager' responsible for designing and delivering training to lawyers, supporting the customer base generally, and negotiating the acquisition of judgments from judges who, at the time, actually had copyright in their own judgments. There I met pioneering legal IT characters like Nicholas Harrison, Kyle Bosworth and Gordon Graham.

BTL was a member of the Society for Computers & Law, and I got closely involved in that. After four years, I saw another interesting job ad, Allen & Overy was looking for a 'Professional Support Analyst' to liaise between the IT team and the lawyers - they wanted a lawyer with computer experience. I was there for two years, working with and for Janet Day, working on their knowledge management, document management and financial support systems - all on IBM mainframe equipment.

In 1986 I then joined KPMG Management Consulting as an 'office systems specialist' where I got an excellent grounding in consultancy, and was expected to find my own work. The only world I knew was legal, so I started getting consulting work with law firms, and founded the KPMG Solicitors Consulting Unit - we were turning over £1m in fees p.a. by 1992 with a team of 4-5. That was good, but not good enough for KPMG who pigeonholed me as a 'boutique operator'. So I left in 1994 and set up shop on my own. This was daunting, as by now I had four kids, but the work came in - this was a boom period for the City. I remember seeing a one-page fee note from a Magic Circle firm at the time with a one-line narrative, "For legal services rendered: £1,000,000". Those were the days.

I was then seduced by the promise of share options to join Keystone Solutions as Director of Product Strategy during which time I got to travel to Sydney and Auckland every six weeks or so, and help sell the Oracle/Keystone software to Clifford Chance.

Then Keystone was acquired by Solution 6; there was really no role for me there and so in 2002 I went back to consulting, but this time with associates - Clive Morris from KPMG, Jill Bazalgette, Mike Fisher and Fran Evans as the Neil Cameron Consulting Group. Over the last 35 years I have worked with over half of the top 200 UK law firms, as well as dozens from places such as Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, Tanzania, Poland, Germany, Belgium, Finland, the US, Chile, Argentina, Canada, Uruguay, Luxembourg, France, Singapore and Malaysia.

Over the years I have got divorced, seen my kids grow up, remarried to Wendy, bought a house in Ithaca and now generally travel back and forth across the Atlantic as work and family exigencies dictate at least until Covid-19.

My interests include fine dining, wine, Martinis, music, literature, movies, the natural world, travel, philosophy, the human condition and the peculiar cognitive psychological biases to which our species is prey.