What we do

You instruct Equipoise. We identify the right counsel in whatever jurisdiction the matter requires, instruct them in writing on a defined scope and a defined budget, test what they produce, control what they cost, and run the matter to a conclusion. We work on disputes, contractual and commercial matters, and we are used to running them across more than one jurisdiction at a time.

Firms are appointed on our terms rather than theirs. Scope, deliverable, deadline, fee basis and reporting obligation are agreed before anyone starts, because conditions accepted at the appointment stage are treated as normal and the same conditions imposed six months later are resisted. Where a matter crosses jurisdictions we appoint a lead and define what each firm is and is not responsible for, so the same question is not researched three times and no question is left to somebody else.

Cost is controlled at the point work is authorised, not at the point it is billed. Each phase carries a budget agreed in advance, work outside it requires approval before it is done, and bills are reconciled against scope and budget before payment rather than after.

What changes

At present every firm comes to the client, and the client is the only person holding the whole history, so the history is explained again to each of them and the client arbitrates when they disagree. We take that over. We hold the history, we brief the firms, and the client deals with one team rather than five. Involvement becomes deciding, on a short list of decisions put with the information needed to take them, rather than administering.

Clients also stop paying twice for the same explanation. Every hour a lawyer spends being brought up to speed is billed, and across several firms in two jurisdictions the same ground is covered repeatedly by people who each charge for covering it.

None of this waits for a review to finish. From the first week instructions are written and scoped, correspondence is sorted before it reaches the client, and nothing substantive begins without a budget.

Reporting

Every live matter gets a written report each month, and there is one consolidated report across the portfolio. Each follows the same format, so one report can be read against the last: an overview written for someone who has not been following it; progress and the actions each firm has taken; what each firm has billed for the month and to date, against the budget agreed, with anything outside scope identified; our assessment, review and analysis of the matter and our considerations for its ongoing management; our concerns; exposure and how it has moved; the changes we recommend; the actions and decisions needed from the client, each with a date and the consequence of not taking it; and the next steps with every critical date.

Who we are

Dr Nick Rowles-Davies

Nick Rowles-Davies qualified as a solicitor of the Supreme Court of England and Wales in 1994 and was admitted in the British Virgin Islands, before the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court, in 2009. He is an accredited mediator and a member of the Institute of Arbitrators, and in 2024 the European Institute of Management and Technology awarded him an honorary doctorate in business administration for services to the legal sector.

Three decades of his working life have gone on assessing and managing disputes. He has assessed several thousand of them across multiple jurisdictions, in each case forming a view on the merits, the realistic range of outcomes, what it would cost to reach them, and whether the lawyers conducting the case were the right ones. He has managed a large number of those matters through to resolution from the client’s side of the relationship, directing the firms doing the work. That assessment work was done at the most senior level of the legal finance industry, where money is committed on the strength of a legal analysis and lost when the analysis is wrong. He has served as Managing Director of Burford Capital, Executive Vice Chairman of Litigation Capital Management and Chief Executive of Chancery Capital Advisors, is Chief Executive of Lexolent, and has run Atlantic Advisors, a disputes advisory boutique, since 2011.

He wrote Third Party Litigation Funding, published by Oxford University Press in 2014 and the principal academic text in the field, and contributed to The Legal Risk Management Handbook and to Friston on Costs, third edition. He divides his time between London and Dubai and works in English and French.

Samuel Arksey

Samuel Arksey served five years as an Ammunition Technician in the British Army, as second in command of a high threat bomb disposal team on counter-terrorism response, and completed multiple operational tours of Afghanistan. He then read law as a mature student, took the Bar Professional Training Course at Nottingham Law School, and was called to the Bar of England and Wales in 2021. He practises as a barrister at 33 Bedford Row in London, appearing in complex proceedings up to and including the High Court.

Since September 2025 he has combined that practice with the role of Projects and Strategy Director at Lexolent Litigation Fund, across Dubai and London, reviewing prospective investments and assisting the Chief Investment Officer with underwriting, which means assessing liability, causation and quantum on multi-million dollar commercial claims. He brings to a client’s matter both the courtroom experience of how cases are actually run and the assessment discipline that decides whether money should be committed against a legal analysis. He is based between Dubai and London.

Ella Rowles-Davies

Ella Rowles-Davies is a solicitor of the Senior Courts of England and Wales, admitted in 2025. She took a Masters in Sociology from the University of Warwick with distinction, completed the Graduate Diploma in Law with distinction, and passed both parts of the Solicitors Qualifying Examination in 2024.

She has practised across the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates, onshore and offshore, in legal risk analysis, regulatory compliance and the management of high value disputes. Her work has covered the assessment of liability, causation and quantum across complex legal assets, and the monitoring of funded matters for legal, procedural and regulatory risk under differing legal frameworks. At Equipoise she applies that to live matters and to the firms conducting them, testing the advice received, tracking cost against budget, and preparing the reports on which clients act. She is based in Dubai.

The bench

Beyond the core team, Equipoise draws on a bench of senior practitioners engaged matter by matter. It includes solicitors and barristers with more than thirty years in practice, among them counsel in commercial practice at the London Bar, weighted towards corporate work and high value complex litigation.

They are used where a matter needs a second assessment, a read on how a case is likely to be received by a court, or a judgement call the client is entitled to have made by someone who has made it many times before. Engaging that experience against a defined question costs materially less than buying it by the hour from a firm, and it is bought on the client’s side of the table.

What we are not

Equipoise is not a law firm. It does not give legal advice, conduct litigation, act as an advocate or hold client money, and it provides no regulated legal service in any jurisdiction. Legal advice comes from the firms we instruct on the client’s behalf, and the client’s relationship with those firms, including privilege, is theirs and not ours.

We take no commission, referral fee, introduction fee or other payment of any kind from any law firm we instruct, and our fee is never a percentage of what the lawyers cost. Our fee comes from the client, so our interest is the same as the client’s.