Get to know Alex Joannou, head of revenue at LEAP Enterprise
Alex Joannou, Head of Revenue at LEAP Enterprise, has worked with more than 1,500 law firms across England and Wales. He talks to LSN about the chaos that builds up over a decade of sensible decisions, why workarounds are worth understanding before you delete them, and what actually changes when you stop being accountable for your own number.
You’ve worked with over 1,500 firms in the last ten years. What does that kind of exposure actually teach you?
It has given me first-hand exposure to a wide range of firms, practice areas, operating models, leadership structures and levels of technology maturity.
Every firm has its own culture, history, clients and ways of working, but many are trying to address similar questions: how to improve profitability, reduce administrative friction, create better visibility across the business and introduce change without losing the qualities that made the firm successful in the first place.
It has also allowed me to see several critical shifts in adoption. When I began working in the sector, technology was often viewed primarily as an operational requirement. Today, it is increasingly a strategic leadership issue. Having experienced that evolution has helped me distinguish between a new technology trend and a meaningful change in the way a firm operates.
You came into legal tech from sports and real estate. Anything from those worlds that still shows up in how you work?
Both, in different ways. High-performance sport taught me that sustained success rarely comes from one exceptional individual. It comes from preparation, shared standards, clearly understood roles and people who are committed to improving together.
Real estate taught me to operate at pace, respond to changing circumstances and build trust around significant commercial and personal decisions. It also reinforced the importance of listening properly before proposing an answer — something that has been central to my approach throughout my legal technology career.
You’ve moved from doing the work yourself to leading teams doing it. What changed?
One of the most important transitions for me was moving from being primarily accountable for my own performance to creating an environment in which others can perform.
Leadership requires a different mindset. It is less about having all the answers yourself and more about setting a clear direction, bringing together different strengths, creating accountability and giving people the support and confidence to make good decisions.
I also work with a wide range of audiences: managing partners, chief executives, finance leaders, operational teams, technology specialists, fee earners and support staff. Each group may view the same technology decision through a different lens. A significant part of my role is creating a common language between those perspectives: asking the right questions, surfacing the genuine priorities and helping firms build a case for change that makes sense across the organisation.
What’s the single biggest operational issue you see in mid-sized firms?
For many mid-sized and large firms, the biggest challenge is not a lack of technology. It is the accumulated complexity of the technology, data and processes they already have.
Most firms have made sensible decisions over many years. A system may have been introduced to address a particular departmental requirement. A manual process may have emerged to bridge the gap between two platforms. A successful team may have developed its own way of working.
Each decision may have made sense in isolation. Collectively, however, they can create an operating environment that is fragmented, difficult to manage and increasingly expensive to change. That complexity has consequences well beyond the IT function. It can slow billing and cash collection, reduce confidence in management information, lead to duplicate effort, create inconsistent client experiences, and place unnecessary administrative pressure on lawyers and support teams.
Mid-sized firms occupy a particularly interesting position. They may have outgrown technology designed for smaller practices, but they do not necessarily want the expense, disruption, and ongoing maintenance traditionally associated with heavily customised enterprise projects.
Everyone says “get the people on board early”. What does that look like in practice?
Start with an honest baseline. Firms need to understand how work is currently completed, where information is held and which manual processes or workarounds people rely on.
Some of those workarounds may appear inefficient, but they may also contain important knowledge about the firm’s clients, risk controls or specialist ways of working. Transformation, therefore, needs to distinguish between what is genuinely valuable and what is simply familiar.
Then involve people properly. Most employees are not inherently resistant to change. They are resistant to change that feels poorly explained, disconnected from their work or imposed without their input.
Collaboration is not simply about making people feel included. It improves the quality of the decision, identifies risks earlier and creates a much stronger foundation for adoption.
And how do you know whether it’s actually worked?
Implementation is not the same as adoption, and adoption is not the same as business impact.
Firms should look for evidence such as faster billing, improved cash collection, fewer manual steps, stronger management information, more consistent matter handling and a better experience for users and clients.
Sequencing matters too. Firms do not need to change everything at once. A series of focused improvements, with visible benefits for clients, employees and the wider business, can build more confidence than a single enormous programme whose value will not become apparent for several years.
The objective is not to make every firm operate in exactly the same way. Established firms have valuable institutional knowledge, specialist expertise and client relationships that need to be protected. The purpose of transformation is not to make a law firm more generic. It is to remove the unnecessary friction that prevents the firm from performing at its best.
