IF Forum: Howard Kennedy

Our thanks to Alan Kaufman and Howard Kennedy, for hosting our meeting on 5 February 2020. Howard Kennedy is a full-service law firm, specialising in providing advice to entrepreneurial businesses and individuals on domestic and international matters. 

Alan Kaufman is a Consultant the firm and a collaborative lawyer and mediator who specialises in family law disputes. He was a Partner and Head of Family Law at Finers Stephens and Innocent before their merger with Howard Kennedy and was previously Managing Partner at Forsythe Saunders Kerman.

Alan talked about no-fault divorce (NFD), the subject of the Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Bill which entered Parliament on 7 January 2020; symbolically, perhaps, a day after “Divorce Day”,  (the first working Monday in January) on which lawyers across the country expect to field the highest number of enquiries from couples unhappy in their marriages.

NFD is a new legal concept intended to stop couples fighting about blame during a break-up. The current system is fault-based, requiring evidence of guilt from one party, who must cite as a reason one of –adultery, unreasonable behaviour or desertion.  If the couple isn’t able to do so, even though the decision to divorce is mutual they face two years of living apart in a ‘separation’ period before the marriage can be legally dissolved; and if one partner contests the divorce then this extends to a minimum of five years.

The new law will mean that ‘irretrievable differences ‘can be cited as the sole grounds. Either spouse will be able to state that the marriage has broken down without having to provide evidence about bad behaviour. This will effectively remove the blame game that plagues the existing system, and causes further bad feeling between couples, which family and children have to deal with. 

However, under the new law, there will be a "cooling off" period of 20 weeks before the grant of a decree nisi. This could extend the current six month average wait from petition to decree nisi to almost a year, and Alan questioned whether such a paternalistic approach is needed.

Paddy Willis is CEO and co-founder of  Grocery Accelerator (GA) (now known as Mission Ventures). GA supports ambitious food and drink brand founders, whose propositions have high-growth potential, and provides them with equity funding, networking opportunities and mentorship from experienced advisors in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector.

In 2004 he co-founded Plum Baby with his then wife. Although neither of them had any experience in retail or the FMCG sector they approached Sainsbury’s with their idea, and were offered an immediate listing. In 2006 their premium organic baby food brand was launched. Within two years they had raised £4 million of funding and within five years they had sold the brand to Darwin private equity for £10m.

Following this Paddy worked with a number of other entrepreneurial businesses variously as adviser, mentor, investor or CEO. He co-founded and is CEO of Mission Ventures Ltd, and led the development of Bathtub 2 Boardroom, a charity that provides early-stage entrepreneurs across all sectors with co-working space and business support. He also sits on the investment committee of Vala Capital. 

After his involvement with Plum Baby he became curious as to whether the model for “business accelerators” which he had seen in the tech world could be deployed within the food industry. 

He and the co-founders of GA believed that it could. The company now provides developing businesses with access to mentorship, investors and other support to help them become stable and self-sufficient. Its clients are typically start-ups which have moved beyond the earliest stages of development and have entered their “adolescence”. They stand on their own two feet but need guidance and peer support to gain strength. As Paddy says GA grows them until they are “fit to take a seat at the dinner table”.

So on the one hand, GA helps start-up brands to grow successfully; and Paddy set out how, on the other, it partners with large corporations. 

In just 5 years, “big food” in the US has lost close to $20billion in revenue to thrusting young challenger brands that have seemingly come from nowhere. Examples are Heinz’ loss of market share to Ella’s Kitchen and Schweppes’ to Fever-Tree. Keeping pace with such change is a challenge for the food industry which must juggle the need for innovation with maintenance of their own historic brands

So GA also helps large corporations to bridge from their world of big brands and dominant market share to the dynamic world of start-ups which are challenging the status quo. These large corporation clients don’t have the time to grow their own start-up brands but are happy to provide GA with capital to seed, develop and grow potential brands on their behalf… until they are fit for a seat at the dinner table! 

Baroness Frances D’Souza sits as a crossbencher in the House of Lords. She was the Convenor of the Crossbench Peers from 2007 to 2011, and thereafter Lord Speaker of the House of Lords until 2016. After returning to the crossbenches she called for urgent action to address the growing size of the House of Lords (HoL), including limits on the Prime Minister's patronage powers.

Baroness D’Souza asked whether the HoL is a constitutional anomaly. With around 800 unelected  members, is it nothing more than an expensive and privileged day care centre?

Reform of the HoL is perennial topic. In 1999, Tony Blair’s government initiated the removal of rights for hereditary peers to sit in the House, but later turned away from plans for a proportion of its members to be elected. From time to time we all doubtless receive change.org invitations to sign petitions calling for the HoL to be replaced with an elected chamber so that we can hold peers to account……. Boris Johnson, purportedly wants to move it up north, possibly to York. 

She explained that HoL has no powers of veto, it simply revises and scrutinises legislation that comes from the House of Commons, and this is a fundamentally important role. Why? The Commons produces a vast amount of legislation (which turns into an avalanche when there is a change in government as is now the case), but can also pass a “guillotine” motion to limit the time allocated to the reading of any Bill. As a consequence some large Bills may go to HoL with little or no scrutiny at all. There is no equivalent guillotine mechanism in the HoL so here such bills can be debated at length if necessary. 

So the HoL scrutinises bills that have been approved by the House of Commons, sometimes line by line, and reviews and amends them to ensure that they do not conflict, for example, with existing laws. All very tedious, she said, but very necessary and, as a result, the Bill leaves the Lords in a better state.

While it is unable to prevent Bills passing into law, except in certain limited circumstances, the HoL can delay Bills and force the Commons to reconsider their decisions. In this capacity, the HoL acts as a check on the House of Commons that is independent from the electoral process.

But where is the Lords’ democratic legitimacy, she asked?  While she agreed that hereditary peerages are unacceptable, and that there is no need to call members “mi- Lord or mi-Lady”, she argued that the case for appointed peers clearly exists. 

One good reason is that many of those who are appointed have achieved general recognition in their fields and so have valuable knowledge and expertise. For example David (now Lord) Ramsbotham. As Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons for England and Wales from 1995 to 2001, he has a wealth of first-hand experience in this area and retains contact with those on the ground, who work at the coal face. He sits on a number of boards of organisations including charities concerned with prisons and prisoner welfare. So when he speaks on such matters he does so with relevant and current experience and the Government listens to him. 

And the HoL needs a broad range of skills and viewpoints, which may not be achieved through elected representation. She cited a recent debate on stem cell research, in which the UK is at the cutting edge. The research requires the cultivation of embryos and thus raises important moral, ethical and religious issues, and the HoL has members with the relevant backgrounds to debate such complex issues. Peers stay in touch with their many different areas of expertise through their networks, and this combined with their personal experience makes their contribution extremely valuable. 

The HoL, she said, is far less party political than the House of Commons. Almost a quarter of its members are independent Crossbenchers. ….. and on the matter of cost she reminded us that no salaries are paid to peers. They simply receive a daily retainer of £323, and then only on the on the days that they attend. 

Baroness D’Souza was clear in her view that the HoL is not a constitutional anomaly and cautioned that it “....... fulfils a very real and necessary function and as such is a necessary instrument of democracy.  Something very similar would need to be designed to replace it. We let it go at our peril”. 

Will Cook is the CEO of The Cure Parkinson’s Trust (CPT), a medical research charity whose mission is to find a cure for Parkinson’s disease (PD). During his 28 year career as a solicitor, he has been a partner of City firms Simmons & Simmons and latterly intellectual property (IP) specialists Marks & Clerk. He retired from partnership in 2018, but remains active as Senior Counsel and as a consultant in several areas of IP law.

Will became a Trustee of CPT five years ago, the inspiration being his childhood friend, best man, and founder of the Trust, the late Tom Isaacs who at 27 was diagnosed with PD. Tom simply would not accept that there was no cure for the disease, and in 2002-2003 walked 4500 miles of the British coastline in 365 days, to raise awareness of PD. In doing so he also raised £350,000 to fund research. In 2005, Tom co-founded CPT, the only organisation in the UK solely dedicated to finding a cure for Parkinson’s. (The established Parkinson's Disease Society (now Parkinson's UK) has the broader, and no less valuable aims of providing support and information to everyone affected as well as encouraging and funding research into the disease). The tragedy of Tom’s unexpected death in 2017, was the catalyst for Will to resign as a partner of his law firm to take up the role of CEO at CPT.

Will described how a major part of CPT’s (circa. £3m annual) fundraising is currently directed towards Tom’s legacy, Linked Clinical Trials (LCT). Under the programme CPT brings together charities, research organisations and experts from around the world to screen drugs for “repurposing” as treatments to slow, stop or reverse the progression of PD. CPT seeks drugs and therapies, already approved and available to treat other conditions, which they  consider to have the potential to treat PD, and brings them to clinical trial. Since 2012, over 2000 drugs have been screened, and a number with disease modifying potential have continued to trial. One, a treatment for type 2 diabetes, has recently finished phase II (test of efficacy of a drug), and a larger Phase III trial (randomized and blind testing in patients) which will run to 2021 is about to begin. 

CPT believes that we are closer than ever to new treatments which for the first time will slow, stop or even reverse the progression of Parkinson's.

Andrew Yeoman is a Co-Founder and the CEO of Concirrus, which is transforming insurance with real-time data and analytics. Andrew’s background is in telematics, technology, sales and management. Latterly he was a managing director at Trimble Navigation, where he was responsible for its transport technology division. Recognising the value of data gleaned from the black boxes fitted in heavy goods vehicles he attempted to sell this information to vehicle insurers; but they weren’t interested, and he ultimately left the company. 

In 2012 he founded Concirrus, initially with the idea of orienting it to the then fashionable notion of the internet of things. Following an injection of venture capital in 2016, however, he decided to focus on the marine insurance market. Despite his experiences with HGV insurers, he chose marine, in the belief that it was a market under-served by technology, despite the volume of data available. And here he didn’t meet resistance, he said, it was more like outright rejection. People didn’t want to change. Their methods of work were ingrained and institutionalised.

Concirrus, he said, is a technology company at heart, with a specific focus on the marine market, and in only four years he has taken that industry by storm. How? By using behavioural rather than demographic profiling to analyse and price risk.

He explained that in a group of a dozen drivers of the same age and demography, one will be the crazy one, another will be very safe and the rest will be middling. The risk profile derives from their behaviour not their demographic and this holds true in commercial marine insurance too. Simply put, there are some ports, some captains, and some technical managers that have different behavioural profiles.

Concirrus has compiled 500 billion records in its platform, with over two trillion data points, including everything you can possibly imagine about the marine insurance industry. Every vessel, the date it was built, where it was built, how it was built, who built it, who’s owned it,  how long they owned it for, who was the technical manager, who operated it, where it has been every 15 minutes for the last seven years, what the weather was like, its average speed, etc. 

The company has codified the entire industry and can combine these datasets with historical claims information to reveal the behaviours that correlate to claims, and this enables it to calculate the appropriate premium for the risk entailed in insuring a fleet.  Traditionally a leather risk binder would have been compiled and presented to the underwriter to price ...... and a week later they would provide a premium! Now it takes a matter of seconds. 

The movement of goods is a growing and increasingly complex area regardless of the mode of transport. Behavioural data is fundamentally changing the understanding and management of risk. It impacts every participant in the value chain, and says Andrew, cannot be ignored. 

Mere humans simply can’t compete with the power of algorithms. Take London cabbies for example. They may have “the knowledge” to drive the most direct routes but Google Maps knows which are congested or closed at this moment.