Part 3 of 7: LECG collapsed and its European economists scattered. Then an English private-equity firm backed a macro-research boutique at a reported four-times-revenue valuation. Outside capital had arrived.
On 17 March 2011, LECG filed a late notice for its 2010 annual report. After selling its practices, it moved to terminate registration in early May. The collapse was sudden; the firm had not been small. A year earlier, after merging with SMART Business Advisory in an attempted rescue, LECG employed more than a thousand professionals in almost 40 offices (SEC 8-K, June 2010). Headcount was already falling when the lawyers arrived. A large global consultancy and major independent European competition house disappeared quickly, carrying a decade of talent with it.
Berkeley economist David Teece and colleagues co-founded LECG in 1988, then expanded by buying boutiques. By 2011 its European competition team had more than 40 economists. From Madrid, Jorge Padilla ran an EMEA network across London, Brussels, Madrid and Paris, including Justin Coombs, Lorenzo Coppi and Neil Dryden. On paper it was valuable. In law it was insolvent.
LECG’s collapse redrew the market between 2010 and 2015. Its 40-plus European economists did not leave through one door. They used three.
The third path leads to BRG, treated here as an LECG successor. Compass Lexecon’s capture of Padilla’s team made the 2011 headlines, but Teece’s decision to start again also mattered. BRG hired quickly. By 2015 its London office appeared in the GCR 100 rankings. The inheritance is clearer in the project chronology than in BRG’s public story.
Compass Lexecon entered 2011 as an American hybrid. Richard Posner, William Landes, Andrew Rosenfield and Daniel Fischel founded Lexecon at Chicago in 1977. Meg Guerin-Calvert, Janusz Ordover, Jonathan Orszag, Peter Orszag and Robert Willig, veterans of Democratic administrations and the DOJ, founded COMPASS in 2003. FTI’s 2003 10-K records about $129.2 million in cash for Lexecon; its 2005 10-K records $73.9 million for COMPASS, in cash and stock. FTI combined them as Compass Lexecon in 2008.
Europe was thinner. London held a few economists; Brussels, Madrid and Paris had little presence in this project’s public source trail.
LECG changed that at once. More than 40 European competition economists arrived together under Padilla. A small EMEA footprint became a recognised practice.
Kirsten Edwards-Warren's later career shows how that credibility channel worked. The project people file records her as a Compass Lexecon EMEA co-head from February to December 2024, then as an Econic Partners co-founder/director from December 2024. Her path sits in a broader pattern for the era: senior regulator or agency credibility moved into private advisory firms, and clients followed names as well as brands.
By 2015 Compass Lexecon sat in the top tier of Global Competition Review every year visible in this project's GCR file. Its European footprint ran through London, Brussels, Madrid, and Paris; its client roster spanned major merger files on the continent. The firm that had barely existed in Europe in 2010 was now one of the region's leading competition-economics practices, a rapid four-year change in the source set.
In October 2014 LDC, Lloyds Banking Group’s private-equity arm, bought a minority of Capital Economics. The reported entry valuation was roughly £70 million. LDC later said revenue exceeded £22.5 million by the 2018 Phoenix sale. The source trail supplies a transaction value, not statutory turnover. Reading the price as roughly four times revenue implies a high-teens business; this remains an estimate, not a filed figure.
It is the dataset’s earliest private-equity row for a pure UK economics-research firm. The broader advisory sector already had financial sponsors: Hellman & Friedman bought AlixPartners in 2006, and CVC took it from H&F in 2012. But AlixPartners was a restructuring platform. LDC was the project’s first sponsor of a standalone subscription-led macro house.
The attraction was plain: subscriptions, high gross margins, low churn and a brand tied to Roger Bootle. He had won the £250,000 Wolfson Economics Prize in 2012 for a euro-exit plan, publicity money could not buy. The firm generated cash, needed little capital and mainly paid rent and salaries. Private equity likes such businesses.
The exit note suggests a simple plan: finance international and digital subscriptions, grow revenue faster than cost, then sell. LDC said revenue rose 30 per cent after the 2014 investment to more than £22.5 million before exit. In March 2018, Phoenix bought control at about £95 million.
The deal set a public price for one research firm, showed that a sponsor would back subscriptions and gave the project a valuation benchmark. Later came Phoenix into Capital Economics in 2018, Growth Capital Partners into Flint in 2021 and Cinven’s Flint investment in 2025. Each deal had its own thesis and evidence.
Three specialist firms anchor this part of the second-tier story. Fideres already existed by 2009; Fingleton and Flint followed in 2013 and 2015. Each was built around a specific post-crisis niche that the incumbents could not serve, or did not want to.
Fideres built around post-2008 financial litigation. Thomas and Hennig knew structured products from inside banks, unusual among expert witnesses drawn mostly from universities, regulators and consultancies. In mid-2014 Alberto Thomas testified to the Treasury Select Committee on benchmark manipulation after the LIBOR scandal. For a firm incorporated in March 2009, it was an early badge of credibility.
The strategic point is that Fideres's opening was post-crisis. A pre-2008 version of the firm would have faced a different case pipeline. The business model required bank-misconduct claims, a litigation-funding and class-action client base, and regulatory findings that could support damages work. In this project chronology, those ingredients become visible between 2009 and 2014.
Fingleton says seven years at the OFT revealed a gap. Lawyers spoke law, economists models; chief executives still needed someone to translate a business into terms a regulator would accept. Regulation was a boardroom problem, not only a legal one. Former regulators could do the translating. Clients agreed.
Flint defined a new category: political-economic consultancy. Not public affairs, classical economics or management consulting, but a hybrid advising multinational companies and sovereign investors on government, regulation and markets. The founders presented themselves as non-partisan. Fraser had served Labour and Conservative administrations as a civil servant. Richards, formerly a Number 10 adviser under Tony Blair, sold the firm on independence rather than party loyalty.
The timing helped, though it does not explain everything. Telecoms was heading into another Ofcom strategic review. The post-crisis settlement was still taking shape. The 2015 political cycle was also returning senior operators to the market—a labour-supply theme Part 4 follows after the 2016 referendum. Companies wanted advisers who understood Whitehall. Flint’s founders had run large parts of it.
The Big Four built economics practices, but none became a durable stand-alone leader in this source set. KPMG founded a competition-economics practice in January 2011, hiring Nicola Mazzarotto from the Competition Commission. It grew to around twenty economists by 2014. Deloitte ran an economic-consulting practice whose lead partner, Robin Cohen, left for CRA in 2013.
Mazzarotto and KPMG partner Caitlin Wilkinson moved to AlixPartners in October 2024. Mazzarotto then joined Compass Lexecon in May 2026. The pair who later launched Grant Thornton’s practice had themselves passed through Deloitte, KPMG and PwC.
PwC and EY maintain economics teams, but position them as advice rather than expert testimony. No Big Four firm appears in GCR’s elite economics tier. One structural constraint is that US auditor-independence rules restrict an auditor from offering expert opinions “for the purpose of advocating” a client’s interest in litigation or regulation.
While specialists formed at the edges, mid-tier partnerships spent 2010 to 2015 consolidating. Their quiet choices still shape the sector.
Baringa Partners spun out of The Structure Group in 2002 and built an energy and financial-services book. Adrian Bettridge, at the firm since 2007, replaced co-founder Mohamed Mansour as managing partner in October 2014. At 31 March 2014 Baringa reported £78.3 million of revenue and 30 LLP members. By FY25 both had risen roughly sixfold, to £450m and 178. The fast growth came after Baringa had chosen to remain partner-owned. The source set records no sale or outside-capital process in this period; the partnership reinvested its own proceeds.
Frontier Economics left employee ownership untouched. Incorporated in April 1999 and trading by summer, it had belonged to staff from day one. FY2015 accounts show 168 staff and revenue just below £30m; by FY2025 the published dataset reaches 460 and £97m. There was no PE deal, sale or partnership restructuring. The founding documents were designed to prevent them.
RBB Economics kept its partnership tight. The first complete count in the database is 15 members in FY2016, with Simon Bishop as managing partner. Earlier filings name only designated members: three in FY2007 and seven in FY2008–09. RBB inverted LECG’s model by staying small, senior and unwilling to hire merely for volume. After LECG collapsed, that looked less eccentric. By the mid-2010s RBB spanned several offices, but kept the inner partnership capped.
Oxera changed legal form. The Oxford firm converted its main business into a limited-liability partnership in April 2014; Companies House incorporated Oxera Consulting LLP on 3 April 2014 as OC392464. Oxford Economic Research Associates Ltd, Oxera Holdings Ltd and Oxera Services Ltd became dormant and were dissolved in May 2023. This was legal restructuring, not a sale, but it gave partners direct equity in profit and aligned Oxera with much of the mid-tier.
By the end of 2015, the source set shows a clearer market. LECG had collapsed, Fingleton launched, LDC invested and Oxera converted. The snapshot follows.
| Firm | Est. 2015 revenue | Structure | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| RBB Economics | ~£31.4m | LLP, tight partnership | 15 members in FY2016 filing row |
| Frontier Economics | ~£29.8m | Employee-owned | 168 staff (FY2015 accounts) |
| Oxera | ~£18m | Newly converted LLP | April 2014 conversion |
| Compass Lexecon | n/a (FTI sub.) | FTI subsidiary | Central London competition player |
| NERA UK | declining | MMC subsidiary | Smaller than its heyday |
| CRA International (UK) | growing | CRA subsidiary | Steady build |
| Brattle Group (UK) | growing | US partnership | Energy and regulation |
| BRG (UK) | growing fast | US-led | Post-LECG absorption |
| Capital Economics | ~£6.7m (8-month transition period to Dec 2015; not a full year) | PE-backed (LDC) | First PE deal in this project file |
The picture looks settled. No row is visibly distressed; NERA UK is smaller than in the 1990s but operating, while every other line is flat or growing. Ownership is mostly British or American. Foreign parents act mainly through subsidiaries.
The alumni family tree that would define the second wave was not yet in motion. The project chronology records few major spinouts in 2015 itself. Mark Pragnell had not yet founded Pragmatix Advisory. The Compass Lexecon departures that later created Econic Partners were still a decade away. The major RBB spinouts had not happened. The Oxera alumni were still inside Oxera.
Below the surface, long-serving senior people could read three signals. The LDC deal later showed that a subscription firm could attract a reported four-times-revenue valuation. Compass Lexecon showed that 40 economists could reassemble under a new brand. Fingleton and Flint showed that one senior regulator with a strong address book could found a credible firm. Hindsight makes these lessons clear. Whether senior ranks understood them in 2015 is inference, not a fact proved by filings.
The dominoes were set. The next visible ones in this narrative start falling in 2017.
In the 2015 source-set snapshot, the UK economics consultancy market was profitable, growing, and comparatively settled. Three things were about to happen in the next five years that would reshape it.
First, US-linked expansion: Cornerstone Research had already arrived in 2014, Analysis Group would open in London in 2017, and BRG would keep on growing. Second, a private-equity control transaction: Phoenix Equity Partners would acquire a controlling stake in Capital Economics in 2018, valuing it at circa £95 million. Third, a Brexit-linked boom in regulatory and political-economic consulting that would carry Flint, Fingleton, and the next wave of specialist firms into the tier above.
Part 4 covers 2015 to 2020: the global arms race.
Read Part 4 →