Halebury
Category: SME Law Firm Diversity and Inclusion Initiative of the Year
WINNER: Halebury (Denise Nurse, CEO and Founder)
Denise Nurse is the CEO and founder of Halebury. She trained and qualified at Charles Russell, worked in-house at Sky, had a second career as a broadcaster for Sky News and BBC 1’s Escape to the Country and in 2007, launched NewLaw firm Halebury with business partner Janvi Patel.
Halebury was created in response to the pressure on General Counsels to do ‘more for less’ and in order to create a genuinely alternative career path for senior in-house counsel looking for more control and flexibility.
With no external funding, Denise and Janvi worked, earned, and ploughed their earnings back into the business to develop the business model. Their aim was to offer a firm that competes with the top 50 law firms and to work with clients in the FTSE 250.
Today they count BT, National Grid, Barclays and Sky amongst their clients and have over 30 lawyers. This year they were ranked in the third tier in the Legal 500 for TMT IT/Telecoms.
Denise said recently in an interview with The Lawyer, “We are so committed to creating a different blueprint. I think we can help create a pathway for those joining the profession that is more inclusive, that embraces different skills, rather than focusing on hourly rates, changing the way lawyers are trained”.