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

Part 2 of 7: In January 2000, NERA was one of the central names in the UK economics market; by 2010, three defectors from NERA had built a rival that would later post the highest profit-per-partner visible in this project's detailed-account LLP sample. The story of how it happened is the story of a decade.

Leath · 10 April 2026 · 15 min read

January 2000, and the UK economics consulting firms in this article's source set clustered around Covent Garden, Victoria, Oxford, Cambridge, and a handful of US-parent London outposts. The senior market was small enough for repeated overlaps: London Economics alumni reappeared at Frontier and DotEcon, NERA alumni would soon reappear at RBB, and the same names kept surfacing around competition, regulation, and macro forecasting. It was a village dressed in suits. And like any village, it was about to be ambushed.

NERA was the firm that mattered. Since the Thatcher privatisation wave, its London office had advised on the electricity sell-off, on water, on British Gas, on British Telecom, and the main gallery of state-owned industries released into shareholder hands. Its European competition practice, run by a Lancashire-born economist called Derek Ridyard, handled large merger cases in Brussels. Lexecon kept a London affiliate. Oxera ran a quiet Oxford practice. London Economics still existed; Oxford Economic Forecasting and Cambridge Econometrics did the macro work; and an eight-month-old upstart called Frontier Economics (incorporated 15 April 1999), chaired by the woman who had once run John Major's Policy Unit, sat in a single London office with around 20 people and a manifesto.

Nobody in January 2000 knew that one of the defining stories of the decade would walk out of NERA's office two years later: a 16-economist RBB founding cohort led by Derek Ridyard, Simon Bishop and Simon Baker.

The establishment, year 2000

Start with who was there. The UK economics consulting market in January 2000 contained perhaps a dozen serious players, and most traced their origins to one of three sources: the Thatcher privatisation programme, the Chicago Law and Economics movement, or the long diaspora from London Economics Ltd. What had once been a professors' cottage industry had, by the millennium, become something closer to a trade.

NERA sat at the top, and sat there comfortably. Founded on 10 April 1961 by Jules Joskow and Irwin Stelzer, the New York parent had been acquired by Marsh and McLennan in 1983, the insurance broker's first non-broking acquisition in a decade, which gave the London office a deep-pocketed corporate sponsor and a blue-chip client list running from the Competition Commission through the major privatised utilities Whitehall had on the books. Derek Ridyard had 13 years at the firm behind him (since 1987), and five years at the UK Government Economic Service behind that. His European competition practice was a model many other firms in London had been quietly trying to copy.

Lexecon had been in London since 1980, an unusually early international expansion for a US firm. The London affiliate operated semi-independently under Michael Walker, who had come over from British Telecom's regulatory team and had co-authored The Economics of EU Competition Law with a NERA economist named Simon Bishop. The book became a standard reference in European competition economics. Walker was at Lexecon London. Bishop was at NERA London. They sat on opposite sides of the same specialist market. They had lunch anyway.

Oxera, in Oxford, was the privatisation shop. Founded in 1982 as a spin-out from the University of Oxford's economics department and chaired by Colin Mayer from 1986, by 2000 its operational leadership sat with Helen Jenkins and Luis Correia da Silva, who would formally take the firm through a management buy-out in 2003. Oxera did regulated-industry work, finance economics, and competition, and it did that work quietly, from an office near Oxford station, without the London swagger or the London overheads. It was smaller than NERA and smaller than Lexecon. Its revenue compounded steadily throughout the decade.

And then there was Frontier. Incorporated at Companies House on 15 April 1999 and trading from May by Simon Gaysford and Daniel Elliott, two former directors of London Economics Ltd. Philip Burns joined the board in September. Michael Webb joined the board in January 2000 and Zoltan Biro by April. By 1 January 2000 Frontier was operating with around 20 consultants in a single London office (its CH-filed FY2001 accounts disclose an average of 19 employees over the year ending 30 April 2000). Frontier's own founding account says the firm was built around staff ownership from the start. The firm has been entirely owned by its staff ever since, and that single decision has remained its defining structural feature. The same account also describes a commitment not to sell and four founding values: interesting, open, fun, profitable. A great many people in the market thought they were mad. The founders built the firm that way because, as they later put it, they personally believed in those values.

Frontier's subsequent milestones are best read as consistent with the founding values, not departures from them. The first international office opened in Cologne in 2003; through the 2010s and 2020s the firm pushed into Australia, Singapore, Spain, France, and Ireland. Through all of this it has remained entirely staff-owned, and its reported pre-tax margin has stayed under 2 per cent. The accounts are consistent with a partnership choosing to return upside to staff as shares and salaries rather than as profit distributions. It is the design choice the founders made in 1999, still visible in the accounts 25 years later.

The board tells a different story from the founding values. Companies House filings show a succession of directors and chairmen drawn from senior British public life. Lord Turnbull (Andrew Turnbull, former Cabinet Secretary and Permanent Secretary to HM Treasury) served as director from January 2006 to November 2015. Lord O'Donnell (Gus O'Donnell, the next Cabinet Secretary after Turnbull and also former Permanent Secretary to the Treasury) served as director and Chairman in Europe from July 2013 to January 2025. And in January 2025, Dame Sharon White, former CEO of Ofcom (2015–19), former Second Permanent Secretary to HM Treasury (2013–15), most recently chairman of the John Lewis Partnership, joined as a director.

Four directors across 25 years: a head of the Policy Unit, two consecutive Cabinet Secretaries, and a former Ofcom chief executive. The appointment dates are documented on Companies House. The firm founded on the principle of rewarding output over background has also chosen establishment figures for board-level roles. Whether that is a contradiction of the founding values or a validation of them is a question the accounts cannot answer.

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 was Derek Ridyard, Simon Bishop, and Simon Baker. Ridyard had joined NERA in 1987 and was the head of its European competition practice. Bishop was co-author of a leading competition-economics textbook. Baker was the senior competition economist across the London and Brussels offices. Between them they were a substantial part of NERA's European competition capacity; between them they had decided to leave; and between them they were taking a great deal of furniture with them.

They did not go to another firm. They started one. RBB says it opened with 16 people, including the three founders and Andrea Lofaro. The name was the three initials on the door: Ridyard, Bishop, Baker. The founding philosophy fit on an index card. Build a brand that outlasts the individuals whose names founded it. Specialise in competition economics, and in nothing else. No management consulting; no macro forecasting; no public policy. Just the competition work, done properly, in a partnership structured to keep the senior economists committed for the long run.

The oddity of the market in 2002 was that Simon Bishop and Michael Walker, co-authors of the leading competition textbook, had finished up at rival firms. Bishop had founded RBB. Walker had moved in August 2000 to open the London office of Charles River Associates, alongside Christopher Doyle (ex-Cambridge and LBS telecoms) and Robert Laslett (financial services). The CRA London launch was announced by press release on 14 August 2000, with 15 staff, and it was positioned around three practices: financial services, telecoms and media, competition. Walker brought the competition practice. He knew the market because he had helped write its rulebook.

By the end of 2002, the sourced picture looked like this. NERA had lost named European competition leaders. RBB had launched with 16 people. CRA had been in London for about two years and had the other half of the Bishop and Walker partnership on its payroll. The open question was whether the boutique model Ridyard had bet on could beat larger incumbents in competition work.

It could.

The rest of the decade, 2003-2009

The years after the NERA exodus were the years the map of the market changed. Consolidation started, but it started from the American side of the Atlantic, and it started with a disputes conglomerate that had made its name on litigation support. In December 2003, FTI Consulting acquired Lexecon.

FTI had been built as a litigation support conglomerate; buying Lexecon gave it a competition and financial economics practice with a 26-year track record, a Chicago Law School pedigree, and a London affiliate that had been operating since 1980. The price, later recorded by FTI as about $129.2 million, was not announced at the time. The strategic logic was straightforward: competition economics was a natural adjacency to the disputes business. Over the next five years FTI would use Lexecon and COMPASS as the basis for a larger global economics brand.

In 2003, a group of senior economists, including three former DOJ Antitrust Division officials, set up Competition Policy Associates, trading as COMPASS. The DOJ alumni were Janusz Ordover (Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Economics, 1991-92), Robert Willig (the same role, 1989-91) and Margaret Guerin-Calvert (DOJ Antitrust Division economist), joined by the Orszag brothers, Jonathan (former National Economic Council) and Peter (former CBO economist who would later serve as Obama's OMB director). In 2006, FTI recorded a total COMPASS acquisition cost of about $73.9 million, made up of $48.2 million in cash and FTI stock valued at $25.7 million. And in January 2008, FTI says Lexecon and COMPASS combined to form Compass Lexecon. The deal was quiet, the rebrand was gradual, and the combined firm would become one of the global reference names in competition economics.

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. For the whole of the founders' decade, the London litigation economics market operated without a local Analysis Group office. That absence is a useful boundary in this source-set read: the UK boutiques built institutional relationships with the Competition Commission, the Office of Fair Trading, and the High Court before a fully resourced Analysis Group London team was present. The counterfactual is interesting, but the project 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.

The statutory accounts tell part of the shape of it. Several of these firms filed small or medium-company accounts at Companies House, so turnover was sometimes disclosed and sometimes absent; where this project uses staff-cost or balance-sheet estimates, they should be read as estimates, not filed turnover. Where firms did disclose, the picture was consistent with growth across the specialist set. The decade was, commercially, a long boom.

The project deal file has no private-equity-backed UK economics-consultancy row in the 2000-2010 window, a contrast with the 2020s, when private or institutional capital appears behind several names in the wider dataset. Capital Economics was still independent under Roger Bootle, doing macro research for financial clients from an office in Westminster. Oxera's founders still owned Oxera. Frontier's founders had distributed equity to the founding staff and were refusing to sell. RBB was a partnership. The visible ownership events in the decade were the FTI acquisitions of Lexecon and COMPASS, both on the American side of the Atlantic, both absorbed into a bigger disputes-consulting conglomerate rather than sold to a financial sponsor. The professionalised, PE-backed architecture that would define parts of the 2015-to-2025 period had not yet arrived. That would come later.

The end of the decade, 2010

Stand at the end of 2010 and look at what had been built. The UK economics consulting market was larger and more plural than it had been in 2000. NERA had survived the 2002 exodus but no longer had the same uncontested European competition story. RBB had shown that a focused, partner-led boutique could compete against incumbents on competition work. Frontier had shown that an employee-owned firm could grow without selling. Oxera had shown that an Oxford-based firm could build a London-class client base without moving to London. CRA had planted a US flag on British soil. Brattle had compounded. DotEcon would win the Queen's Award for Innovation for its spectrum auction work in 2011; the decade-long build-up was what earned it.

Compass Lexecon, formed in January 2008, was still finding its shape. The combined FTI entity had Washington DC, Chicago, and a small London footprint inherited from the old Lexecon Ltd affiliate. Globally, though, LECG was still the largest specialist competition-economics firm visible in this source set: a publicly listed California consultancy with a large international office network, a European practice run from Madrid by Jorge Padilla (European CEO since 2009, after five years as Senior Managing Director), and a headcount story that had already turned from expansion to attrition. Its last pre-merger 10-K reported 806 employees and said the SMART deal added roughly 500 more at closing, giving it a scale that NERA's UK operation did not match.

Nobody in 2010 knew that LECG had a year to live.