Andrew Gray
Legal Innovation and Transformation Manager
About
Thirteen years in practice, latterly as a Senior Associate in Real Estate at a global firm, handling complex property transactions, landlord and tenant work and bespoke commercial agreements. As part of that, I was always keen to see how technology could help streamline the delivery of legal services, and at some point realised I'd rather be building the tools than using them. I've now moved over to the dark side, and help to lead legal innovation and transformation at a top 50 UK law firm — building out the function's tooling and governance, and working alongside lawyers to make sure what we build actually fits how they practise. Doing some of that building myself keeps me honest about what these systems can and can't actually do, and why that matters in practice. It's always useful to know where the tools you're using start and end, and what has to be built in between.
1 Project
Compendium
Compendium is a front end for the UK Companies House register. It pulls the same public data anyone can get from the official site, but arranges it around the questions you would usually ask when you're reviewing a company, rather than around how the register happens to be filed. Instead of hopping between five tabs to work out whether a company looks healthy, you get one screen: a 0–100 risk score built from five things that matter: company status, insolvency history, outstanding charges, whether they file on time, and how many directors have walked in the last five years. Crucially it shows its working, so you can see that a score of 16 is really "one outstanding charge taken out last September, and four of nine officers gone" rather than a number you have to take on faith. The bits that save the most time are the bulk actions. You can paste in a list of company names or numbers in more or less any format, and it'll resolve every line to a real company, handing back the ambiguous ones for you to pick from rather than quietly guessing, then score and rank the lot. You can filter a company's whole filing history, tick what you want, and download every PDF as a single ZIP instead of clicking them one at a time. It'll find every filing that names a particular director across all the companies they sit on, which the official site simply won't do. And anything you're looking at exports either as an Excel workbook if you want the data, or a PDF report if you want something to hand to someone.