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The Value Was Always the People: A candid look back with Tim Roberts

July 8, 2026 - 10:10 PM

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When the Legal Services Act opened the door to outside ownership of law firms, very few were ready to walk through it. Tim Roberts was one of the few who did, becoming one of the first leaders to bring private equity into a legal business and seeing early what much of the profession is only now weighing up in earnest.

Tim qualified as a lawyer and, in 1987, joined a small insurance firm called Badhams, spending his first decade as a commercial litigator acting for insurers. When the older partners grew concerned about the firm's future, he led a buyout of the four of them and set about reshaping it. Over the next ten years, a £6 million practice of around 100 people became a multidisciplinary group of roughly 2,500, turning over close to £160 million. He got there by rethinking how insurers and lawyers worked together: moving away from hourly billing, taking on risk around claims results, and adding services such as loss adjusting, rehabilitation and outsourced claims handling.

The path was rarely smooth, and Tim is refreshingly candid about that. In conversation with Jonathan Firth, Vice President, UK&I at LHH, he reflects on what going first really taught him: the danger of deal fatigue, the weight of heavy leverage, and a painful 2015 restructure that forced him to split the firm, sell parts of it and buy the rest back in a pre-pack.

For Tim, one realisation stands out above the rest. The investors understood the firm's finances and its contracts in detail, but never quite grasped what sat beneath them. As he puts it: "Irrespective of the contracts, the value was the partners and their teams. So, if you don't look after those partners and if you're not able to look after those teams or they feel that the business is different and they leave, then that affects the value of your business."

After a further private equity chapter and a year out, Tim found REF, formerly Renaissance Executive Forums, where he is now a Partner, COO and Forum Leader. The international peer advisory network brings together around 3,500 CEOs across roughly 20 countries, in confidential boards of 10 to 15 leaders from non-competing industries who meet one morning a month. His own forum of 10 offers senior leaders the kind of counsel he wishes he had had himself.

Tim points to McKinsey research suggesting that between a third and a half of new CEOs are considered to be failing within their first 18 months, and that, he argues, is exactly where peer advice earns its place.

Watch the full conversation here:

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