SPEAKER

Stuart has 30 years’ experience as a practising lawyer and in senior management positions in global law firms and offshore. 

He now works as a legal business services consultant and change expert advising law firms and legal departments on service and efficiency improvement, knowledge management, innovation (including digitisation and uses of AI) and process enhancement. 

His roles in private practice have included Director of Practice Development, Knowledge & Innovation at Dentons, where he reorganised and managed the Practice Support Lawyers, the Professional Support Team and the Innovation Team (which he set up from scratch) and Director of Knowledge for the Global M&A Practice at Baker McKenzie. 

He is a LawTech UK mentor, a member of the Lawtech Sounding Board at the City of London, and set up (and chairs) the Industry Mentor Group for Oxford University’s postgraduate Law & Computer Science Programme. 

He is a contributing author to Legal Due Diligence in International M&A Transactions - A Practitioner's Guide (Kästle/Svernlöv eds, 2022), quoted in Professional Services Leadership Handbook: How to lead a professional services firm in a new age of competitive disruption (Beddow, Kent, Furner & Clark 2017) and was the editor of Baker McKenzie’s International Joint Ventures Handbook (1st ed. Oct 2015) and Global M&A Handbook (1st ed. Mar 2015). 

A graduate of the Cranfield NED Programme, Stuart has Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Law from Oxford University, an MBA from Henley Business School, and—after a recent sabbatical—a Masters’ degree (with Distinction) in African Studies from SOAS, University of London where his dissertation was on Economic Anthropology. 

Most recently he has been appointed a Visiting Lecturer to the Law Faculty at Oxford University. He is admitted as a solicitor (non-practising) of the Supreme Court of England and Wales and the British Virgin Islands, and is a Qualified Mental Health First Aider, and a Qualified UKCC Level 1 rugby coach.

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