Konsileo: A full-service legal partnership
About Konsileo
John Warburton and Peter Henderson founded Konsileo in 2016 to prove there was a better way of providing commercial insurance broking services, at a time when private equity-backed consolidators were reshaping the industry. The idea was straightforward in principle, radical in practice: give every client-facing person their own profit and loss, wrap it with technology to make it efficient, and build a culture that genuinely supported the people doing the work. The promise to every broker who joins is the same: to be the happiest, best rewarded, and most professional version of themselves.
Regulated as an insurance broker by 2018, Konsileo's growth accelerated sharply during the pandemic, when both the remote-working model and the firm's employment proposition proved their value at the same time.
Today, Konsileo has 170 brokers and a team of more than 200 people, built without a single acquisition. The firm has consistently won Best Insurance Employer (SME) at the British Insurance Awards, including in 2024 and 2025, and in October 2024 added Insurance Age's Commercial Lines Broker of the Year. It is, as John put it, proof that "huge growth is possible without M&A."
The Beginning: What Brought Konsileo to Tend
Konsileo first started working with Tend Legal in 2021, becoming one of the firm's earliest subscription clients.
What drew them in was a very specific problem.
Insurance broking is an industry where post-employment restrictions are frequently invoked, and used aggressively by larger firms to protect their client books when a broker moves. When Konsileo started hiring from the market, letters started arriving from former employers and their solicitors, sometimes before the ink on a new broker's contract was dry. For a start-up that had never faced this before, it was alarming. For well-resourced competitors, that was partly the point.
Konsileo's approach to post-employment restrictions is deliberate and built into the business model. The firm assumes that brokers joining from other firms will honour their covenants, which typically run for up to 12 months, and sets revenue expectations in year one accordingly. That commitment is reinforced with every new joiner.
What Konsileo did not anticipate was how aggressively competitors would use covenant letters even where there was no genuine breach. As John put it, being sure they were compliant was one thing: as a fast-growing start-up without deep financial resources, the risk of being bullied by better-resourced competitors into costly litigation over something they knew to be unfounded was a very real concern.
"What we really needed was genuine advice. And what we realised was we did not really want to go through the process of having to brief somebody on our business model every single time we had one of these letters, because they looked like they were going to become quite frequent."
The subscription model made sense immediately. Not just for cost certainty, but for something more fundamental: building a relationship with lawyers who knew the business, so every new situation did not have to be explained from scratch.
"We needed somebody who could stand and walk alongside us as we grew rather than somebody who would be on a transactional basis. That was why the subscription logic was really compelling to us."
How the Relationship Grew
Employment law
The employment work formed the foundation. When a restrictive covenant letter arrives, the response needs to be quick and precise: triage the situation, understand the scope and enforceability of the covenants at issue, get a firm grasp on the facts specific to the broker involved, and advise on how to proceed. Speed matters, and so does knowing the business well enough to assess the merits without briefing from scratch every time.
The work has run in both directions. Alongside defending Konsileo against incoming letters from competitors, Tend has supported Konsileo in enforcing its own covenants where brokers have left and those restrictions have been breached.
Over time, the employment work has expanded well beyond restrictive covenants. Konsileo has a skilled internal HR team, and Tend now functions as a genuine extension of that team: providing legal advice on the harder employment questions, supporting the HR team with process documents and guidance on particularly complex situations, and acting as a sounding board when the team needs to sense-check an approach. Tend and the Konsileo HR team meet monthly to work through live matters together.
"Having a law firm as a partner rather than on a transactional basis, is really advantageous."
Investment rounds
As Konsileo grew and began raising capital to fund its hiring and technology, Tend took on the legal work for each round. This means more than preparing documents: structuring the legal framework for the investment, negotiating the key terms of the subscription agreement and ancillary documents with different investor parties, making sure Konsileo's interests are protected throughout, and driving the matter towards close. Across multiple completions with different investor groups, Tend has now supported Konsileo through over £10 million of equity raised.
"What has been really valuable is that Tend understand our shareholders' agreement and our articles very well, so that when it comes to doing subsequent rounds or any variations, it is a relatively straightforward process of talking through the implications, because it is building on top of a known. There is something positive about the longevity of a relationship with a lawyer when they understand your background documents and the business model."
Governance and company secretarial
The third strand of work is ongoing governance and company secretarial support: board meetings, shareholder and board resolutions, Companies House filings, and the record-keeping that makes future fundraising and due diligence far less painful.
A central part of this has been implementing Kudocs, a platform that gives key stakeholders real-time visibility of their shareholdings, makes passing resolutions and obtaining shareholder approvals quick and straightforward, handles shareholder communications, and serves as a single source of truth for all board documents and records. For a company with a growing investor base and multiple completions behind it, having that infrastructure in place materially reduces the friction around each new transaction.
"We moved to quite a high degree of outsourcing of our company secretarial work to Tend, dealing with Companies House, board meetings, shareholders resolutions, board resolutions. What is good there is that it gets ahead of future transactions by having a very strong legal due diligence and governance record, which we tried doing ourselves in the early stages and found we were not able to locate documents in a timely fashion when needed."
In John's Words
"It does feel like an in-house legal situation. So much so that we invited Alistair and his colleague to our big annual conference, and they are very much treated as part of the team."
"I'm not sure that we would be able to replicate the quality of legal advice that we have been able to have from Tend Legal if we were to try and get somebody in-house. The whole thing has worked really well. We get partner-quality advice where we need it, but we also have specialists in employment law or corporate structuring as well available to us."
"We have never had those jolting legal bill conversations, because there has been a retainer which has obviously risen over time as the scope has increased, but it has always seemed very reasonable. It is just a good, partnerial way to do it."
"There is an opportunity to start the relationship in a fairly low-risk manner. What is good about a subscription approach is you can get to know someone in a relatively low-key fashion. You can be more open, and invest time in getting them to know your business. And they are there when you need them."
Looking Ahead
John and his team built something genuinely different in a conservative industry. What began as a conversation about how to handle the first restrictive covenant letters has grown into a relationship spanning employment, corporate, and governance work: a genuinely full-service legal partnership for a company that has grown fast and done it properly.
Konsileo continues to go from strength to strength, and it has been a privilege to walk alongside them through this period. We look forward to the next chapter.
© Tend Legal Ltd. Published with John Warburton's permission.
"Having a law firm as a partner rather than on a transactional basis, is really advantageous."
Meet the team
Whether it's putting in place the right documents for your staff, handling tricky processes or dealing with employment disputes, Georgiana will calmly navigate your business through employment law requirements.
Georgiana has acted for clients ranging from start-ups and SMEs across a host of different industries working at both a Legal 500 firm and boutique west end London law firm gaining experience and knowledge from a broad spectrum of clients and cases. She enjoys working with clients as their businesses grow and providing the employment law support, they need at each stage of those journeys.
Having worked on both the employer and employee sides, she has a real insight into how each party is likely to approach a matter. She delivers clear, pragmatic advice and practical solutions in a friendly, no-nonsense manner.
When not crafting bespoke employment solutions, Georgiana can be found running early in the morning, enjoying ballet performances and art exhibitions, going on long walks and being by the sea.
From the moment she got involved in her parents' businesses at a young age, Nicole knew she had a passion for helping businesses thrive.
A corporate and commercial solicitor, Nicole focuses on the work that matters most to growing businesses: M&A transactions, investment rounds, shareholder agreements and company secretarial support. She also helps clients navigate the commercial side: negotiating and reviewing contracts, advising on joint ventures, and being a steady pair of hands through transactions of all sizes.
Nicole is also working towards an MBA, which tells you something about her character and her love of business. Her advice is grounded in commercial reality, not just legal theory.
When she's not taking care of business, Nicole likes to read, run, play tennis and attend church.
Alistair co-founded Tend Legal with Shona on a simple idea: that small and medium-sized businesses deserve the same quality of legal advice as large companies, without the large firm experience.
As a solicitor with a broad commercial practice, he advises business owners on the full range of issues that come with running and growing a company. That means employment law: advising on settlement agreements, workforce decisions and the day-to-day employment questions that land on founders' desks. It means commercial work: negotiating and reviewing contracts, supplier agreements, and the commercial arrangements that keep a business running. And it means corporate transactions: from business sales and acquisitions to investment rounds, share structures and restructures.
Before co-founding Tend Legal, Alistair was a partner at Woodfords Solicitors in South West London, where he spent over a decade building a reputation for clear, commercial advice to SMEs. He is known for his calm approach, his ability to cut through complexity, and his willingness to give a straight answer.
When not working or acting as taxi driver to his three children, Alistair can be found riding bikes or skateboards, playing various instruments, or at church.
