Ben McGuire

Simmons & Simmons

Former British Army officer turned Simmons & Simmons’ innovation and business change director, Ben McGuire was the driving force behind his firm’s acquisition last summer of legal engineering company Wavelength. The deal represents the coming together of many threads pulled by McGuire since he joined Simmons from the Takeover Panel in 2016, and also serves as an indicator of the future direction of the firm’s innovation initiatives.

Back when he joined Simmons, the ‘innovation group’ was just McGuire. Now he leads a department of two teams with a total headcount of around a dozen and growing, populated with non-traditional roles and using non-traditional tools such as project management.

McGuire has also established what innovation means at Simmons: diversification and optimisation. The Wavelength acquisition is the end result of McGuire and his growing team’s success at instituting and democratising a way of working that amounts to a catalyst to allow the firm’s people to engage with the product development process. Simmons now has around 25 products in development at any one time.

As McGuire puts it: “We’re not here to tell people what to do but to build the systems that allow their creative tendencies to flourish.”