About Us
We are Jandr’s founders, wife and husband team Jena and Ryan Hockley. We founded Jandr in 2015, in the belief that two distinct challenges in the legal industry should be combined to solve each other:
- the inability of traditional law to offer genuinely agile working arrangements to experienced, highly-regarded lawyers to prevent them leaving the profession for family or caring commitments or other personal reasons; and
- the quality issues in the paralegal and interim legal resource market with its over-reliance on law graduates and inexperienced legal professionals.
We created a working arrangement that allows us to reconnect those experienced leavers to the profession, providing high quality paralegal and interim legal services across a wide range of legal tasks and projects.
Our Mission
- Our instructing lawyers: frictionless ease of use, matching their quality standard.
- Our end clients: exceptional value and workproducts.
- Our freelancers: sustainable working arrangement with firms and clients that are worthy of their experience.
Our Aims
Our aims in the short to medium term are to:
- Establish deep and ongoing relationships with a sustainable number of firms and clients.
- Ensure that our services make appropriate use of leading technology solutions, including Generative AI, where there are benefits for our clients to do so.
- Continue to grow our pool of experienced legal freelancers carefully and sustainably so as not to put our quality proposition at risk.
Under pressure from clients to make use of AI in legal tasks? We can help!
Legal tech incorporating AI will transform the industry. If firms are not feeling the pressure from clients already, it will inevitably come in future pitches or panel interviews.
The challenge for law firms is that it is not currently certain how or to what extent AI will deliver benefits on any given matter. Some matters will be instantly susceptible to the benefits of AI, and clients could miss out on improved outcomes (e.g. on cost or speed) if a firm spends too long evaluating before taking the plunge.
We offer firms a low risk option of making immediate use of AI (or any other kind of legal tech), backed-up by a low cost/high quality human option. If the AI delivers benefits, they will be passed on to the client. If the AI only gets part of the job done, we’ll make sure it is completed on time and to the required standard.
AI in eDisclosure
Leading eDisclosure platforms are already incorporating Generative AI into the heart of their products. For example, to classify documents, to summarise document contents or to generate arguments or factual summaries across hundreds of documents at a time. It could dramatically speed up tasks such as creating chronologies and preparing proofs or summaries for witness interviews.
AI in contract negotiation
AI in commercial contracting can identify clause types, compare them against agreed playbooks, highlight clauses falling outside of policy and propose drafting changes where necessary. To assist in this regard, we have an enormous training set of negotiated commercial clauses, particularly on NDAs in the financial services context.
How We Attract the Best People
An entirely remote working arrangement and the ability for our freelancers to set their own working hours (within reasonable limits), allows us to access a talent pool who are not able to commit to full time, in-office working. This includes people with childcare, volunteering or other regular commitments and people who have relocated from London and other cities.
We tend to grow our pool of freelancers through connections within the team and via referrals from trusted clients and suppliers. We’re quite selective in what we are looking for: experience as advising counsel in leading City firms or in-house teams for blue chip corporates.
Our freelancers enjoy working in supportive teams with like-minded people, taking their work seriously but not ourselves. We provide team-leading and project management opportunities where desired, but it suits a lot of our freelancers to log-off and not worry about work until their next working day.
Mum's the Word
When parents (often, but not exclusively, mums) leave traditional law for family reasons, it is often with a heavy heart. They might have decided that the traditional working arrangement is not compatible with their family commitments, but they have worked hard for their qualifications and have excellent experience which would be criminal to waste.
We can speak with some authority on this topic, as this was the situation that Jena found herself in, after taking some time out to have children.
We offer parents the chance to leverage their skills and experience and to maximise their earning potential, whilst retaining total control to make the work fit around their life.
Security & Collaboration
Data security and confidentiality are the essential foundations underpinning our business.
Our teams work remotely using Office 365 applications running on cloud PCs in a Microsoft-hosted virtual network, operated by a highly experienced and accredited London-based MSP (Fitzrovia IT Limited). Our remote working set-up has been designed specifically for compliance with the rigorous demands of information security due diligence processes we have been through for a leading global investment bank and a ‘Silver Circle’ City law firm. We’re confident that our arrangements would satisfy the most stringent of requirements and we’d be happy to provide additional detail or respond to any information security questionnaires or audits as required by a firm’s on-boarding processes.
In addition to our information security measures, our experienced freelancers have all acted as advising lawyers for leading City firms and corporates, during which they have demonstrated the highest levels of personal professional conduct, respect for client confidentiality and compliance with policies.
Competitive Rates, Exceptional Value
Our hourly rates are competitive and typically a fraction of law firm junior lawyer rates, which is a reasonable point of comparison given that our reviewers typically have 5-10 years’ PQE.
In the managed services market, we are priced a little higher than our larger competitors, mainly because we pay our reviewers at above market rates (reflecting their above market experience and performance). Once speed of review and accuracy are taken into account, we believe that we offer far better value to clients.
We’re happy engage on the most appropriate commercial arrangement, be that hourly rates, day rates, retainer arrangements or per document or other kinds of fixed pricing.
document review platform
Everlaw
We have experience with all the leading eDisclosure platforms and we regularly work on projects using Relativity in particular. We are well versed in running searches and other administrative tasks and we work well with the platform licence providers, ensuring that nothing is lost in translation between legal and IT.
We have found the Everlaw document review platform to be superior, and our platform of choice, in just about any kind of matter. We are proud to be an Everlaw partner and reseller and we hold the Everlaw Litigation Support Manager certification, the most comprehensive Everlaw certification.
In addition to the functionality one would expect in a document review platform, Everlaw offers:
- “Search-engine speeds” when running searches and when navigating between documents.
- Predictable, flat rate pricing based on monthly data volumes, inclusive of all functionality and unlimited users. Uploads, processing, imaging, OCR’ing, predictive coding, clustering and productions all included in the hosting cost.
- Machine translations of 53 languages and automated transcriptions of audio and video files.
- Intuitive screens and workflows with free training, extensive online documentation and free support.
Lawyers, reviewers and clients all have very positive things to say about using Everlaw. One of our reviewers summed up our feeling about Everlaw perfectly when, having switched to an alternative platform after an Everlaw matter, described the experience as “like going back in time 10 years”.
Meet The Team
Jena
In many respects, Jena was muse for Jandr. Jena trained at Norton Rose (now with added Fulbright) and qualified into a dispute resolution team specialising in shipping, aviation and energy disputes. She left as a mid-level associate to start a family and quickly took the decision that she did not want to return to commuting life and law firm office hours while her children were young.
Ryan
The recent developments in legal technology came about at the perfect time for Ryan, to help him make sense of his own CV.
Ryan studied computing modules as part of his engineering degree and after graduating he worked in IT consultancy for PwC and IBM for 5 years.
