Qualter: Legal expertise and technology combined
A Newcastle-based managed legal services business with its roots in Carillion and Clifford Chance’s operations in the city has attracted new investment.
Mark St John Qualter – one-time chief executive of DWF’s managed services division – has also become strategic adviser to the board of NuCAS.
NuCAS, which works with both law firms and in-house teams, is the brainchild of solicitor Richard Tapp and Lucy Nixon.
All the firm’s law firm clients are based in London at the moment, though the picture was more mixed for in-house legal departments.
“Our model is incredibly scalable and we can see nothing but further opportunities in the market,” said Ms Nixon. “We’re very ambitious and we have grand plans.”
Mr Tapp was director of legal services at construction and services giant Carillion and in 2012 set up Carillion Advice Services (CAS), which was spun out of the company’s in-house team and run by Ms Nixon.
CAS was a paralegal-led managed legal services centre. Among its contracts were the housing and debt legal aid phone lines.
CAS was bought by Clifford Chance in 2018 after Carillion collapsed and Ms Nixon continued as head what became the magic circle firm’s Newcastle delivery centre until 2024.
She and Mr Tapp launched NuCAS in October last year, with investment from Nick Crasner, who joined as an adviser. He runs Crasner Consulting, which advises law firms, and founded Crasner Capital, an investment bank and Crasner Ventures, a venture capital platform.
Ms Nixon said she and Mr Tapp wanted to use their experience to “finish what they started” at CAS.
Mr Qualter joined this month with his experience at DWF, which bought and integrated Mindcrest, a leading alternative legal services provider, scaling the combined managed services business to more than 850 employees across three continents.
He has been head of artificial intelligence for commercial and private banking at NatWest Group and is currently also part-time chief financial officer at regtech business Control Now.
He said: “Throughout my career I’ve seen how technology creates the greatest value when it is integrated into the operating model rather than simply layered onto existing ways of working.
“That’s what attracted me to NuCAS. It has built a business around the combination of legal expertise and technology from the outset, creating a model that has the potential to redefine how legal services are delivered.”
Ms Nixon said she and Mr Tapp remained owners of the majority of the shares in NuCAS and there was no immediate need to seek further investors.
She explained that the core team was made up of senior paralegals, all with experience of managing paralegals, and Mr Tapp was the firm’s only solicitor.
Ms Nixon said a range of services did not need a qualified lawyer and “a bright paralegal” could do “a lot of legal work that solicitors typically do”. She was not “averse” to using solicitors, but “for a huge chunk of work we don’t need them”.
NuCAS also offers an AI readiness service – this is not just consultancy but helping clients implement and embed it, Ms Nixon explained.
“We use whatever tools are right for the problem. There is a lot of demand from people asking what is suitable for AI and what might not be.”
She said GenAI was a “huge driver” in getting legal teams to think about doing things differently, which had only really happened in the last couple of years.
Whether it involved streamlining processes or documenting knowledge, it was often a case of getting things in order so clients could get the best return on their investment.
Ms Nixon added that their ambitions extended beyond the UK.