About founder & strategic legal consultant Andrew Magowan
The businesses that land their plans have something in common.
They are pro-active about their legal and compliance stuff.
They give the time and they do the thinking to get ahead of their legal stuff. They resist the easy temptation to just sit back, cross their fingers and hope for the best. They don't see reacting and fighting as the best way to defend their interests.
That is far from a common approach, though, as I know from my 25+ years in "the law". Most legal advice is written for what goes wrong.
Mine is built around landing what you're trying to make happen.
Legal and compliance stuff can seem unpredictable and like it comes out of nowhere. But I know that it can be predicted and prepared for, so businesses are able to plot their way around their potential legal problems so they have greater confidence that they will land their long-term plans. I know, because I've done it.
I've been lucky enough to work for & with some amazing, fast-growing, ambitious businesses. Each time, I knew that thinking about what was coming at us ever more quickly was just as important as dealing with what was on our plate right now if we were to land our plan.
I definitely made some mistakes in working out how to do that. A couple of times, I got far too close to crashing into a wall. But across my 15+ years as a General Counsel, I worked out the approach, the methodology and the key to looking round legal corners.
Across that time, I worked out the pro-active legal intelligence that enables businesses to land their plans. And now I love sharing that intelligence with ambitious businesses with transformational long-term plans. If that's you, let's have a chat.
The journey that built the belief
It was at Bristow Group, a US-listed UK-headquartered helicopter services operator building an increasingly international business, that my plan-landing instincts really started to grow. Head office's default approach was to manage local partners the way a lot of multinationals do: tell them what to do, loudly if necessary.
I took a different approach.
I built relationships with those partners instead. Asked for their input. Trusted them to respond in kind. After their initial surprise, they did.
It was an early lesson in something I've only become more convinced of since that time: that relationships, handled well, move faster and last longer than legal leverage ever does. And that relationships are critical to landing plans.
That instinct only grew further when I joined ASOS in 2012 as General Counsel. ASOS was one of the fastest-growing businesses in the UK at the time, with a young, internet-native team that believed deeply in what they were building and had absolutely no interest in anything that felt corporate or old-fashioned. My job was to build a legal function that fit that business like a glove, robust enough to protect it, agile enough to keep it moving fast. Key to that was getting the pro-active engagement of everyone in the building on what we wanted to achieve.
But the moment that showed me just how powerful it can be to put relationships first and get ahead of legal issues had nothing to do with "the law".
ASOS faced a five-year global IP attack. Serious, sustained, expensive and potentially even existential. We had strong, well reasoned legal positions. We had big law firms alongside us. We had done months and months of preparation. None of that was what ultimately resolved it.
What resolved it was a simple apology I gave.
That moment crystallised everything I had been coming to believe about law, about business, and about what actually creates long-term success. It wasn't combat that worked. It wasn't sitting back and just hoping things went away or didn't happen. It was the pro-active decision to see the long-term and prioritise a relationship.
From ASOS I moved to Berry Bros & Rudd, a 325 year old wine and spirits merchant, still family owned, now in its eighth generation. I was their first ever legal hire. Coming in after a fast-growth internet rocketship, the contrast couldn't have been sharper. With its carefully preserved family atmosphere, BB&R had the quiet confidence of a business that thinks in decades, not quarters. And the foundations of its business were relationships with customers and suppliers that had lasted for years & years & years.
BB&R deepened something I'd been brewing for years. The businesses that last aren't the ones that fight hardest. They're the ones that are proactive. They're the ones that look ahead. They're the ones that tend their relationships across generations. They're the ones that work hard to build partnerships, friendships even.
That's why I founded Relationship First Law. Because the legal profession is letting businesses down. Especially those with big ambitious plans.
The legal industry is built around combat: contracts designed to trap people, disputes resolved by whoever fights hardest, and lawyers who measure success by how much leverage they can extract. That combat actively works against the businesses it's supposed to serve. It destroys relationships. It wastes time and money. It keeps them in the here and now, with their head down. It pulls leadership teams away from building something.
Ambitious businesses deserve better. They deserve legal thinking that looks forward, not backward. Legal thinking that pro-actively protects & enables long-term plans, rather than reacting. Legal thinking that treats relationships as the strategic asset they are.
I finally found a version of being a lawyer I'm proud of. And I founded Relationship First Law to share it.
Beyond the law
Everything I do outside Relationship First Law makes me better at what I do inside it.
I'm proud to give something back to Northern Ireland, the place I'm from and the place I call home. I am an Independent Non-Executive Director at the Department of Health in Northern Ireland, one of the most complex operating environments in the public sector, managing an £8bn+ budget against rising demand and funding constraints. I'm also a Non-Executive Director at Middletown Centre for Autism, a cross-border centre of excellence for the education of children & young people with autism, jointly funded by the governments of Northern Ireland & the Republic of Ireland, and created under the Good Friday Agreement.
That second role is personal as well as professional. My stepson has autism and doesn't speak. When he was younger, the Centre was a real support to his mum. Knowing what organisations like this mean to families makes me want to make sure this one thrives.
For nine years I was Chair of Barons Court Project, a homelessness and mental health charity in Hammersmith, where I lived for 20 years. During that time, government austerity stripped back the statutory funding that small charities had relied on, while demand for services kept growing. A lot of charities didn't survive that period. Barons Court Project did. I'm proud of that.
I mention all of this not to pad a biography, but because it shapes how I think. Boards make better decisions when someone brings a different perspective and asks the uncomfortable questions early. Organisations become more robust without losing what makes them special. Relationships, tended carefully over time, outlast almost everything else.
The same thinking. In every room I walk into.
Let's Talk
If any of this resonates — if you've read this and thought "that's exactly what we need" — I'd love to have a conversation.
Not a sales call.
Just an honest discussion about where you are, where you're trying to get to, and whether I can help you get there without anything derailing you along the way.
I work with a small number of businesses at any one time. That's deliberate. The work I do requires genuine commitment on both sides, and it only works when the relationship is right.
And while I'm based in Northern Ireland and can work anywhere, I love working with ambitious businesses across Northern Ireland and Ireland.
If that sounds like the kind of partnership you're looking for, let's find out.