Alan Hodgart
CEO, Founder,
H4 PARTNERS

Alan is recognised as one of the world's leading strategic development advisers to professional services firms. Alan assists his clients in developing the means to improve - and sustain - their competitiveness by establishing effective strategic management and leadership processes. He is particularly experienced at converting strategic change into practical action steps, and in helping firms build commitment to the behaviour changes required. He has a deep knowledge of competitive trends in the professional services markets and uses this to assist clients in arriving at a genuinely competitive position. Alan also maintains a research database on competitive trends in the professional services markets of all major jurisdictions. Alan is the author of the recently published book Strategies and Practice in Law Firm Mergers. He was recently awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award for his work with professional services firms

Alan Jenkins,
Chairman,
EVERSHEDS

In addition to chairing the board of Eversheds LLP, he is responsible for Eversheds International strategic development. He was formerly managing partner of Frere Cholmeley Bischoff, before its merger with Eversheds.  As a lawyer, he has practised in the fields of commercial litigation, international arbitration and professional negligence and has worked on many high profile cases. He has dealt with various governments agencies and state owned bodies around the world.

He was Head of the Environmental Law Group at Frere Cholmeley Bischoff.  He is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce and the Society of Advanced Legal Studies and he has spoken and written on a variety of topics.  He has part written International & Commerce Fraud (published by Sweet & Maxwell - 2001) and “Dossiers - Arbitration, Money Laundering, Corruption and Fraud” published by the ICC Institute of World Business Law (2003). He is Vice Chairman of the boards of trustees of the International Institute for Environment and Development and of the Foundation for International Environmental Law and Development and also a trustee of GAP Activity Projects Ltd. He was educated at New College Oxford.

Keith Wood,
CEO,
SJ BERWIN  

Keith Wood has the dubious accolade of having survived more than four decades working in the City.  After a brief spell with the Bank of England, he sought the roller coaster excitement of investment banking.  Having survived Big Bang, an enforced three day week working by candlelight in the 1970’s, two take-overs, and the first bank to use Chapter 11 as a get out of jail process, not to mention a recession or two, Keith thought he would welcome a change from the kaleidoscopic management practices of investment banking.

In 1990 Keith joined SJ Berwin, anticipating an easier ride and a rest from the relentless and unforgiving pace of the City.  Surely lawyers would be easier to manage than a bunch of intellectually arrogant, profit oriented investment bankers?  How wrong can one man be?  However Keith’s expertise of taking complex management issues, presenting them in straightforward terms and offering simple, practical solutions seemed to engender more debate than decisions with the partnership.  Consequently, as a non-lawyer Chief Executive, he adopted guerrilla-style tactics to inveigle his way into this tightly knit group of first-class brains and engage them constructively in the black art of managing a highly profitable business.

Keith has enjoyed a captivating and insightful journey through this dense jungle of a legal partnership in one of the fastest growing City law firms.  He believes this experience will benefit him in his next career goal - to manage the Royal Opera House.

Olivier Chaduteau,
Managing Partner,
DAY ONE INTERNATIONAL LLC

Olivier Chaduteau advises professional services firms all around the globe, helping them structure their strategy, create business development processes and tactics, open offices, merge with other firms. Before creating Day One International, LLC in New York and Day One in Paris, Olivier R. Chaduteau worked with Arthur Andersen as the Director of Marketing, and Business Development and created the marketing and business development department at Ernst & Young. Olivier is Member of the board at Cognacs Camus. He also has been interviewed by the Darrois Commission set up by French President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2008 and the "Attali Commission" also set up by French President Nicolas Sarkozy on "Growth liberalization for France" in 2007.
Olivier has two Masters degree (California State University and University of la Sorbonne.

Robert Levin,
MD,
EMERGING STAR VENTURES,
and Technology Pioneer 2008,
WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM

Robert Levin is Managing Partner of Venture Capitalist,  Emerging Star Ventures, LLC, focusing on selection of alternative investments in new technologies. 
He is an outspoken commentator about recent and future trends in advanced technology, cleantech, artificial intelligence for language technology, mobile technology, foreign policy issues and global emerging markets.

Robert is also a renowned author of the best-selling,first biography of President Bill Clinton, Adjunct Professor of Finance at Columbia University, advisor to the National Geographic Society and contributing member of the World Economic Forum. In the early 1990's he served as a Director for ViaTel, a value-added telephony services provider, from inception to IPO. 

He was selected by the World Economic Forum as a Technology Pioneer 2008 and attended their annual forums in Davos and Tianjin, China  as CEO of Transclick, which is an award-wnning multilingual mobile messaging platform launching applications on the BlackBerry and Nokia platforms. He is the inventor of one issued patent for connecting  machine translation servers,  customized micro glossaries and collaboration servers. 

Lee Bryant
Co-Founder and Director,
HEADSHIFT

Lee Bryant is an on-line social communication specialist with a focus on knowledge development, and has a strong belief in the empowering potential of the Internet. In 1996, he co-founded one of the first successful online agencies to focus on building online knowledge communities, and In 2002, Lee and his team founded a new company, Headshift, to focus on the emerging area of social software. Since then, he has become a leading writer and practitioner in the field of augmented online social interaction, and Headshift is now at the forefront of the UK social software industry, pioneering innovative business uses of social technology in the legal sector, professional services, corporates, government and the public sector.

Professor Hagai Segal,
Analyst and Consultant on Online Terrorism,
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY IN LONDON 

The leading expert on online terrorism and cyber security, Hagai M. Segal is an award winning academic, consultant and analyst, specialising in the Middle East and Asia, radical Islamism/modern terrorism, and geo-strategic and economic risk. Segal has a long track record as a consultant, analyst and advisor to numerous banks, finance/investment houses, international corporations, business groups, security and police agencies and politicians across the globe.

He specialises in analysis of geo-strategic and economic risk factors – specifically developments in terrorism – increasingly online terrorism, the Middle-East and Asia, and developments in US Foreign Policy – and how these factors affect global and regional security and the global economy. He has additionally participated in top-level Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. www.hagaisegal.com

Mary Hensher,
Partner, CIO, UK & Switzerland,
DELOITTE LLP 

Mary is one of the Professional Service sector’s most outspoken proponents of the pivotal strategic role of the CIO in the broader business. Mary is a member of Deloitte’s global IT management body, the CIO Council. In 2003 she became CIO and partner for Deloitte, in the UK and in 2002 Hensher led the IT integration of 3,500 Andersen partners and employees into the firm, joining Deloitte’s 6,500 people and IT systems, including the IT departments of both firms. Joined Deloitte as IT director 1999 started her career as a programmer, moving on to transforming and managing customer services and training departments, major project management and some consulting work at KPMG.
She is refreshingly straightforward about the role of IT in an organisation. “My job is constantly reviewing the firm’s IT cost base, and building on business continuity plans and security,” she says. But when it comes to new ideas and implementing strategic business models she believes the CIO has a central role to play.  “Nobody has a monopoly on good ideas, and the CIO is often in a central position where they have a broader sight of where business processes need to be improved, than other senior executives,” she says. “The CIO should be ideally placed to harness the creative ideas from the best people in their business and bring them together to create efficient business models. “