The Founders' Decade: How UK Economics Consulting Was Built, 2000-2010

Part 2 of 7: NERA began 2000 near the centre of the market. By 2010, three defectors had built the rival that would later lead this project’s detailed-account LLP sample for profit per partner.

Leath · 10 April 2026 · 15 min read

In January 2000, the firms in this source set clustered around Covent Garden, Victoria, Oxford, Cambridge and a few American outposts in London. The senior market was intimate. London Economics alumni reappeared at Frontier and DotEcon; NERA alumni would soon reappear at RBB. The same names circulated through competition, regulation and forecasting. It was a village in suits, and an ambush was coming.

NERA mattered most. Since privatisation, its London office had advised on electricity, water, British Gas, British Telecom and much of Whitehall’s industrial sell-off. Derek Ridyard ran its European competition practice and handled large Brussels mergers. Lexecon had a London affiliate; Oxera a quiet Oxford practice. London Economics survived, while Oxford Economic Forecasting and Cambridge Econometrics covered macroeconomics. Frontier Economics, incorporated on 15 April 1999, was eight months old, around 20 people strong and armed with a manifesto.

Two years later, a 16-economist cohort led by Ridyard, Simon Bishop and Simon Baker would walk out of NERA and found RBB.

The establishment, year 2000

At the beginning of 2000, perhaps a dozen serious players operated. The January 2000 market descended from Thatcher’s privatisations, Chicago law and economics, or London Economics. A professors’ cottage industry was becoming a trade.

NERA sat comfortably at the top. Jules Joskow and Irwin Stelzer founded its New York parent on 10 April 1961; Marsh & McLennan bought it in 1983. The London office gained a wealthy sponsor and clients ranging from the Competition Commission to privatised utilities. Ridyard had worked there for 13 years, since 1987, after five in the Government Economic Service. Rivals copied his European competition practice.

Bill Bishop founded Lexecon Ltd in London in 1991, legally separate from Chicago’s Lexecon Inc despite the shared brand. Michael Walker was a senior associate there from 1993 to 1998, then moved through British Telecom to London Economics. By January 2000 he was its competition-policy director. Along the way he wrote The Economics of E.C. Competition Law with Simon Bishop, creating a standard reference. Walker sat at London Economics, Bishop at NERA. They still had lunch.

Oxera was Oxford’s privatisation shop. Founded in 1982 from the university’s economics department and chaired by Colin Mayer from 1986, it passed operational control to Helen Jenkins and Luis Correia da Silva by 2000. They led a management buy-out in 2003. From near Oxford station, the firm handled regulation, finance and competition without London’s swagger or costs. It was smaller than NERA and Lexecon, but grew steadily.

Frontier was the upstart. Simon Gaysford and Daniel Elliott, two former London Economics directors, incorporated it on 15 April 1999 and began trading in May. Philip Burns joined the board in September, Michael Webb in January 2000 and Zoltan Biro by April. On 1 January 2000 it had around 20 consultants in one London office. Its first accounts, to 30 April 2000, reported 19 employees on average; a year later the figure was 36.

Staff ownership defined the firm from the start and still does. Frontier also promised not to sell and adopted four values: interesting, open, fun, profitable. Many rivals thought the founders mad. They built it that way because they believed the words.

The later record fits those values. Frontier opened Cologne in 2003, then expanded through the 2010s and 2020s into Australia, Singapore, Spain, France and Ireland. It remains entirely staff-owned. Reported margins have rarely left the low single digits and have stayed below 2 per cent since FY2018. The accounts are consistent with value returning to staff through shares and salaries rather than residual profit. A decision made in 1999 remains visible 25 years later.

The board is more establishment than insurgent. Companies House shows Lord Turnbull, former Cabinet Secretary and Treasury permanent secretary, serving from January 2006 to November 2015. His successor as Cabinet Secretary, Lord O’Donnell, was a director and European chairman from July 2013 to January 2025. Dame Sharon White joined in January 2025 after leading Ofcom from 2015–19, serving as the Treasury’s Second Permanent Secretary from 2013–15 and chairing John Lewis.

Across 25 years the directors included consecutive Cabinet Secretaries and a former Ofcom chief. The firm that promised to reward output over background also chose establishment figures for its board. The accounts cannot say whether that contradicts the values or vindicates them.

The 2002 NERA exodus

April 2002. Global Competition Review ran a headline that froze the London market for a week: "Top economics trio leave NERA in the lurch."

The trio were Derek Ridyard, Simon Bishop and Simon Baker. Ridyard, at NERA since 1987, led European competition. Bishop had co-written a leading textbook. Baker was the senior competition economist across London and Brussels. Together they represented much of NERA’s European capacity. They were taking colleagues as well as furniture.

They founded RBB with 16 people, including Andrea Lofaro. The name used their initials: Ridyard, Bishop, Baker. The philosophy fitted on an index card. Build a brand that outlives its founders; do competition economics and nothing else; structure the partnership to retain senior economists. No management consulting, macro forecasts or public policy.

By 2002, textbook co-authors Simon Bishop and Michael Walker sat at rival firms. Bishop had founded RBB. Walker had joined Christopher Doyle, a telecoms economist from Cambridge and LBS, and financial-services specialist Robert Laslett to open CRA London in August 2000. The 14 August 2000 announcement described 15 staff and three practices: financial services, telecoms and media, and competition. Walker brought the last of these. He had helped write its rulebook.

By the end of 2002, NERA had lost its named European leaders, RBB had 16 people and CRA had spent two years in London with the other half of the Bishop-Walker partnership. Could Ridyard’s boutique beat larger incumbents?

It could.

The rest of the decade, 2003-2009

After the exodus, consolidation redrew the map from America. In December 2003, litigation-support group FTI Consulting acquired Lexecon.

Lexecon brought FTI a 26-year competition and financial-economics practice, a Chicago Law School pedigree and an affiliation with Bill Bishop’s separate London firm. The unannounced price was later recorded at about $129.2 million. Competition economics sat naturally beside disputes. Over five years, FTI used Lexecon and COMPASS to build a global brand.

Senior economists founded Competition Policy Associates, or COMPASS, in 2003. Three came from the DOJ Antitrust Division: Janusz Ordover, Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Economics in 1991-92; Robert Willig, who held the role in 1989-91; and economist Margaret Guerin-Calvert. Jonathan and Peter Orszag joined them from the National Economic Council and Brookings respectively; Peter later led the CBO and Obama’s OMB.

In 2006, FTI recorded a COMPASS acquisition cost of about $73.9 million: $48.2 million in cash and stock worth $25.7 million. FTI says COMPASS and Lexecon combined in January 2008 as Compass Lexecon. A quiet deal and gradual rebrand created a global competition-economics reference name.

Around the consolidation, new specialist shops kept opening. Vivid Economics launched in 2006, founded by Cameron Hepburn, an Oxford academic and environmental economist, and by Robin Smale. Vivid built its practice around climate policy and environmental valuation, a segment that had not existed as a commercial niche a decade earlier. CEPA, incorporated at Companies House on 25 September 2000 (CH 04077684), added Mark Cockburn from PwC in 2002 and grew into a steady regulated-industries shop. Brattle had been in London since 1997, serving European utility liberalisation, and kept compounding without much drama. The sector grew wider as it grew taller.

Analysis Group, one of the large US economics consultancies, was not in London. Its UK entity would not be incorporated until February 2017. Throughout the founders’ decade, London’s litigation market operated without a local Analysis Group office. UK boutiques built relationships with the Competition Commission, Office of Fair Trading and High Court before a fully staffed Analysis Group team arrived. The counterfactual is interesting; the chronology is simpler. Analysis Group was not locally incorporated during that decade.

Revenue and scale by 2010

By the end of the decade the pecking order had reshuffled. NERA was still a large specialist economics firm in London, but its European competition practice had lost the Ridyard-Bishop-Baker cohort. RBB had grown from 16 people to several times that figure. Frontier had passed a hundred staff on its employee-owned model and was beginning to open European offices, starting with Cologne in 2003. Oxera was larger than it had been at the start of the decade, still partner-led, still based in Oxford.

Statutory accounts show only part of the change. Small- and medium-company filings sometimes omit turnover. Staff-cost or balance-sheet estimates in this project are labelled as such, not presented as filed revenue. Where disclosure exists, specialist firms generally grew. Commercially, it was a long boom.

* NERA London is an estimate derived from disclosed turnover at sector-typical revenue per head; NERA UK does not disclose headcount in its filed accounts.

The deal file has no private-equity-backed UK economics consultancy in 2000-2010. In the 2020s, several names have private or institutional capital. Capital Economics remained Roger Bootle’s independent macro house in Westminster. Oxera’s founders owned Oxera. Frontier distributed equity to staff and refused to sell. RBB was a partnership.

The visible deals were FTI’s American acquisitions of Lexecon and COMPASS. Both joined a disputes conglomerate rather than a financial sponsor. The PE-backed architecture visible in 2015-to-2025 had not arrived.

The end of the decade, 2010

By the end of 2010 the market was larger and more varied than in 2000. NERA survived the 2002 exodus but lost its uncontested European position. RBB proved a focused partnership could challenge incumbents. Frontier grew without selling; Oxera won London-class clients from Oxford. CRA planted an American flag, Brattle compounded and DotEcon’s spectrum-auction work gained recognition beyond regulatory corridors.

Compass Lexecon, formed in January 2008, was still taking shape. FTI had Washington and Chicago; London would grow after the 2011 LECG acquisition, while the old Lexecon Ltd had gone to CRA in 2005. LECG remained the largest specialist visible in the global source set: a listed Californian group with an international network and a European practice run from Madrid by Jorge Padilla. He had been European CEO since 2009 after five years as Senior Managing Director. Yet headcount had already turned from growth to attrition. Its final pre-merger 10-K reported 806 employees and roughly 500 more from SMART at closing, far beyond NERA UK’s scale.

In 2010, LECG had a year to live.