Jonathan Watmough

I am passionate about helping people succeed in the business of law in a human, sustainable way.

I was born in the Yorkshire Dales but raised in the Sussex Downs. I have been a lifeguard, gardener, dishwasher, hotel porter, humper in a meat factory, pilot, fruit farmer, decorator, builder's mate and bartender. My parents both left school at 15 and I was the first in my family to go to university.

I qualified as a Solicitor in The City of London at Reynolds Porter Chamberlain in 1993. Practising in M&A and equity capital markets, I became a partner at thirty, managing partner at thirty-eight and spent the next ten years helping to transform RPC from a London insurance firm into an international, multi-disciplinary professional services business.

The firm delivered five consecutive years of double-digit top and bottom-line organic compound growth when the rest of the market stagnated following the Global Financial Crisis, won Law Firm of the Year three times, won the Managing Partners’ Forum’s strategic leadership award and was named five years running as Best Legal Employer. I was also twice-named within The Lawyer’s Hot 100 lawyers in the UK.

After ten years as managing partner, I retired from the firm in 2016 to help lawyers and leaders of lawyers cut through to what matters and emulate the simple things successful people do differently in private practice. No theory, no platitudes, just practical common sense guidance on what matters most in the real world of the business of law, why and how to do it to get ahead. And in 2024 I encapsulated this in my book How To Thrive In A Commercial Law Firm.​

I have also combined my entrepreneurial streak with my passion for understanding people and relationships and co-founded Quintillion, a technology group that develops cognitive and behavioural analytics. Quintillion’s flagship product, myTeamRadar, uses next-generation human factors visualisation to help reveal, diagnose and resolve hidden performance and wellbeing problems in teams.