The all-nighter that led an ex-Quinn litigator to build an AI startup
Hanna Roos discusses why she left Big Law to build out her vision for how companies should manage disputes.
Contents
Hanna Roos has pulled plenty of late nights as a City disputes lawyer, but one filing pushed things further than usual.
She and her colleagues had been preparing a brief for a sovereign state until three in the morning. Realising it would take about two hours to commute home and back, she decided to grab a few hours of sleep under her desk and wake up early to finish.
"I woke up at 5 am because there was a woman standing over me and she was shrieking. I had never met her, so I started shrieking. She was the cleaning lady and she was not expecting a body under the desk,” she says.
Today she laughs about the story, but at the time it made her question the way things worked.
“I thought, okay, this sector is not optimised for whatever it is that we're trying to do,” she says.
That moment eventually set her on a path to founding Aavagard, a litigation boutique built around charging for outcomes rather than hours.
Later came Aavalynx, a legal technology company using AI to help in-house corporate teams manage disputes, which recently raised £1.5 million.
On being different
"I'm not at all a usual person," she says, before laughing. "I don't think any entrepreneur is."
Growing up as the eldest of 12 children in a devoutly religious family in Finland, she learned responsibility early. Leadership came naturally, as did questioning convention.
“I was very young when I said that religion wasn’t for me. It was a major disruption in the family story culturally, and it was devastating to my parents,” she says.
I wasn’t afraid to be different, do things differently, and to fail.
“It gave me the muscle later on to go, I remember what it feels like to disappoint and disrupt, and I’m okay.”
She says that experience built her comfort in challenging expectations, a mindset she carried into her legal career.
Roos trained at Freshfields before joining Latham & Watkins and later Quinn Emanuel in London, but even inside some of the world’s top law firms, she found herself questioning long-held assumptions about how legal services should be delivered.
“I wasn’t afraid to be different, do things differently, and to fail,” she says.
Realising the vision
Leaving private practice gave Roos the chance to build the kind of legal business she felt was missing from the market.
"I looked at the market and thought there is no existing institution I want to be in because I want to create genuine disruption," she says.
She recalls feeling constrained by the hierarchy of large firms, where challenging established ways of working often proved difficult.
"I felt like it was this very grey echo chamber where I couldn't speak truth to power. I couldn't say what I actually thought.”
She founded Aavagard in 2021, a disputes boutique built around charging for resolutions rather than hours. But as generative AI emerged, she realised technology could push that vision much further.
Starting her own business gave her the freedom to test ideas she believed the legal industry had been slow to embrace, from alternative pricing models to using AI to help clients make better decisions about disputes.
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Disrupting the model
Roos has no bone to pick with the law itself. In fact, she remains passionate about the profession, pointing to her work supporting Kenya in claims brought by survivors of torture during the Mau Mau uprising as the kind of litigation that reminded her why she became a lawyer.
But beneath it, sits a commercial model that she believes often works against clients' interests.
"Because law firms get paid for volume of work, they don't have an immediate incentive to resolve disputes as fast as clients want resolutions. The idea was: charge for resolutions, not for time."
While much of legal AI has focused on helping lawyers draft documents or review contracts more efficiently, Roos believes the bigger opportunity lies in helping companies resolve disputes sooner.
"A law firm can be more efficient by using AI on a six-year dispute," she says. “But the real disruption is you resolve it in six months."
She argues companies should use technology to decide earlier whether to settle, fight or pursue another strategy, rather than simply making lawyers more efficient.
As she puts it: "Good tools make disputes efficient. Great ones make them disappear.”
The trade-offs
Roos wants to help businesses understand the full commercial impact of a dispute before it turns into years of litigation.
Aavalynx is designed to bring together a company's legal, commercial and operational data into a single platform, allowing in-house teams to model different scenarios and understand the financial consequences of fighting, settling or pursuing another strategy.
The platform factors in external legal fees, management time, reputational risk and the potential impact on future business opportunities. She likens it to an aircraft cockpit.
"If you are the pilot, what we give you is the panel you need to see in front of you to fly safely," she says.
Instead of relying solely on legal advice, she argues in-house teams can make decisions with a much clearer picture of the commercial trade-offs.
"The in-house team ends up looking like superheroes to the commercial leaders because they are finally speaking about disputes in terms of numbers."
Getting joy back
Talk to Roos for long enough and the conversation repeatedly returns to a word not often associated with litigation: joy.
"The law is a talent business that does not realise it's a talent business," she says.
She believes firms have historically focused almost exclusively on technical excellence while paying too little attention to leadership and human performance.
If you stare at a problem for 16 hours, it takes you longer and the outcome is worse...
"What you really need to do to lead well in the law is to view your team as elite athletes."
Drawing on cognitive science and performance coaching, she believes lawyers produce their best thinking when they have time to recover rather than simply working longer.
"If you stare at a problem for 16 hours, it takes you longer and the outcome is worse than if you put the problem down and go do something else,” she says.
The ‘passion economy’
Roos believes AI will ultimately reduce demand for junior lawyers, but she argues the profession shouldn't romanticise the existing model.
"What we pretend in this discussion is that the world pre-AI was somehow perfect,” she says.
Instead, she believes technology will create room for lawyers who genuinely enjoy the work.
"This is really an opportunity to create a passion economy where the lawyers who really love the law do it… and the ones who don't really love the law can pursue their first passion."
Law Firm | Trainee First Year | Trainee Second Year | Newly Qualified (NQ) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Addleshaw Goddard | £52,000 | £56,000 | £100,000 |
| Akin | £60,000 | £65,000 | £174,418 |
| A&O Shearman | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Ashurst | £57,000 | £62,000 | £140,000 |
| Baker McKenzie | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Bird & Bird | £48,500 | £53,500 | £102,000 |
| Bristows | £48,000 | £52,000 | £95,000 |
| Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner | £53,000 | £58,000 | £125,000 |
| Burges Salmon | £49,500 | £51,500 | £76,000 |
| Charles Russell Speechlys | £52,000 | £55,000 | £93,000 |
| Cleary Gottlieb | £62,500 | £67,500 | £164,500 |
| Clifford Chance | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Clyde & Co | £48,500 | £51,000 | £85,000 |
| CMS | £50,000 | £55,000 | £120,000 |
| Cooley | £55,000 | £60,000 | £157,000 |
| Davis Polk | £65,000 | £70,000 | £180,000 |
| Debevoise | £55,000 | £60,000 | £173,000 |
| Dechert | £55,000 | £61,000 | £165,000 |
| Dentons | £52,000 | £56,000 | £104,000 |
| DLA Piper | £55,000 | £60,000 | £140,000 |
| Eversheds Sutherland | £50,000 | £55,000 | £120,000 |
| Farrer & Co | £48,500 | £51,000 | £89,000 |
| Fieldfisher | £48,500 | £52,000 | £100,000 |
| Freshfields | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Fried Frank | £55,000 | £60,000 | £175,000 |
| Gibson Dunn | £60,000 | £65,000 | £180,000 |
| Goodwin Procter | £55,000 | £60,000 | £175,000 |
| Gowling WLG | £48,500 | £53,500 | £105,000 |
| Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer | £56,000 | £61,000 | £145,000 |
| HFW | £52,000 | £56,000 | £103,500 |
| Hill Dickinson | £44,000 | £45,000 | £80,000 |
| Hogan Lovells | £56,000 | £61,000 | £145,000 |
| Irwin Mitchell | £43,500 | £45,500 | £78,000 |
| Jones Day | £60,000 | £68,000 | £165,000 |
| K&L Gates | £50,000 | £55,000 | £115,000 |
| Kennedys | £43,000 | £46,000 | £85,000 |
| King & Spalding | £62,000 | £67,000 | £175,000 |
| Kirkland & Ellis | £60,000 | £65,000 | £174,418 |
| Latham & Watkins | £60,000 | £65,000 | £174,418 |
| Linklaters | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Macfarlanes | £60,000 | £65,000 | £150,000 |
| Mayer Brown | £55,000 | £60,000 | £150,000 |
| McDermott Will & Schulte | £65,000 | £70,000 | £174,418 |
| Milbank | £65,000 | £70,000 | £174,418 |
| Mills & Reeve | £46,800 | £47,000 | £84,000 |
| Mishcon de Reya | £52,500 | £57,500 | £110,000 |
| Norton Rose Fulbright | £56,000 | £61,000 | £140,000 |
| Orrick | £60,000 | £65,000 | £160,000 |
| Osborne Clarke | £55,500 | £57,500 | £97,000 |
| Paul Hastings | £60,000 | £68,000 | £173,000 |
| Paul Weiss | £60,000 | £65,000 | £180,000 |
| Penningtons Manches Cooper | £48,000 | £50,000 | £83,000 |
| Pinsent Masons | £52,000 | £57,000 | £105,000 |
| Quinn Emanuel | n/a | n/a | £189,000 |
| Reed Smith | £55,000 | £60,000 | £135,000 |
| Ropes & Gray | £62,000 | £67,000 | £170,000 |
| RPC | £48,000 | £52,000 | £95,000 |
| Shoosmiths | £45,000 | £47,000 | £105,000 |
| Sidley Austin | £60,000 | £65,000 | £175,000 |
| Simmons & Simmons | £54,000 | £59,000 | £120,000 |
| Simpson Thacher | n/a | n/a | £178,000 |
| Skadden | £58,000 | £63,000 | £177,000 |
| Slaughter and May | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Squire Patton Boggs | £50,000 | £55,000 | £110,000 |
| Stephenson Harwood | £50,000 | £55,000 | £105,000 |
| Sullivan & Cromwell | £65,000 | £70,000 | £177,000 |
| TLT | £44,000 | £47,500 | £85,000 |
| Travers Smith | £55,000 | £60,000 | £130,000 |
| Trowers & Hamlins | £47,000 | £51,000 | £85,000 |
| Vinson & Elkins | £60,000 | £65,000 | £173,077 |
| Watson Farley & Williams | £51,500 | £56,000 | £107,000 |
| Weightmans | £36,000 | £38,000 | £70,000 |
| Weil | £60,000 | £65,000 | £170,000 |
| White & Case | £62,000 | £67,000 | £175,000 |
| Willkie Farr & Gallagher | £60,000 | £65,000 | £180,000 |
| Winston Taylor | £56,000 | £61,000 | £125,000 |
| Withers | £47,000 | £52,000 | £95,000 |
| Womble Bond Dickinson | £43,000 | £45,000 | £83,000 |
Rank | Law Firm | Revenue | Profit per Equity Partner (PEP) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | DLA Piper* | £3,130,000,000 | £2,500,000 |
| 2 | A&O Shearman | £2,900,000,000 | £2,000,000 |
| 3 | Clifford Chance | £2,400,000,000 | £2,100,000 |
| 4 | Hogan Lovells | £2,320,000,000 | £2,400,000 |
| 5 | Linklaters | £2,320,000,000 | £2,200,000 |
| 6 | Freshfields | £2,250,000,000 | Not disclosed |
| 7 | CMS** | £1,800,000,000 | Not disclosed |
| 8 | Norton Rose Fulbright* | £1,800,000,000 | Not disclosed |
| 9 | HSF Kramer | £1,360,000,000 | £1,400,000 |
| 10 | Ashurst | £1,030,000,000 | £1,390,000 |
| 11 | Clyde & Co | £854,000,000 | Not disclosed |
| 12 | Eversheds Sutherland | £769,000,000 | £1,400,000 |
| 13 | Pinsent Masons | £680,000,000 | £790,000 |
| 14 | Slaughter and May*** | £650,000,000 | Not disclosed |
| 15 | BCLP* | £640,000,000 | £790,000 |
| 16 | Simmons & Simmons | £615,000,000 | £1,120,000 |
| 17 | Bird & Bird** | £580,000,000 | £720,000 |
| 18 | Addleshaw Goddard | £550,000,000 | £1,000,000 |
| 19 | Taylor Wessing | £526,000,000 | £1,100,000 |
| 20 | Osborne Clarke** | £476,000,000 | £800,000 |
| 21 | DWF | £466,000,000 | Not disclosed |
| 22 | Womble Bond Dickinson | £450,000,000 | Not disclosed |
| 23 | Kennedys | £428,000,000 | Not disclosed |
| 24 | Fieldfisher | £385,000,000 | £1,000,000 |
| 25 | Macfarlanes | £371,000,000 | £3,100,000 |
What do City lawyers actually do each day?
For a closer look at the day-to-day of some of the most common types of lawyers working in corporate law firms, explore our lawyer job profiles:
| Firm | London office since | Known for in London |
|---|---|---|
| Akin | 1997 | Restructuring, funds |
| Baker McKenzie | 1961 | Finance, capital markets, TMT |
| Davis Polk | 1972 | Leveraged finance, corporate/M&A |
| Gibson Dunn | 1979 | Private equity, arbitration, energy, resources and infrastructure |
| Goodwin | 2008 | Private equity, funds, life sciences |
| Kirkland & Ellis | 1994 | Private equity, funds, restructuring |
| Latham & Watkins | 1990 | Finance, private equity, capital markets |
| McDermott Will & Schulte | 1998 | Finance, funds, healthcare |
| Milbank | 1979 | Finance, capital markets, energy, resources and infrastructure |
| Paul Hastings | 1997 | Leveraged finance, structured finance, infrastructure |
| Paul Weiss | 2001 | Private equity, leveraged finance |
| Quinn Emanuel | 2008 | Litigation |
| Sidley Austin | 1974 | Leveraged finance, capital markets, corporate/M&A |
| Simpson Thacher | 1978 | Leveraged finance, private equity, funds |
| Skadden | 1988 | Finance, corporate/M&A, arbitration |
| Sullivan & Cromwell | 1972 | Corporate/M&A, restructuring, capital markets |
| Weil | 1996 | Restructuring, private equity, leverage finance |
| White & Case | 1971 | Capital markets, arbitration, energy, resources and infrastructure |
| Law firm | Type | First-year salary |
|---|---|---|
| White & Case | US firm | £32,000 |
| Stephenson Harwood | International | £30,000 |
| A&O Shearman | Magic Circle | £28,000 |
| Charles Russell Speechlys | International | £28,000 |
| Freshfields | Magic Circle | £28,000 |
| Herbert Smith Freehills | Silver Circle | £28,000 |
| Hogan Lovells | International | £28,000 |
| Linklaters | Magic Circle | £28,000 |
| Mishcon de Reya | International | £28,000 |
| Norton Rose Fulbright | International | £28,000 |
Law Firm | Trainee First Year | Trainee Second Year | Newly Qualified (NQ) |
|---|---|---|---|
| A&O Shearman | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Clifford Chance | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Linklaters | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Slaughter and May | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
Law Firm | Trainee First Year | Trainee Second Year | Newly Qualified (NQ) |
|---|---|---|---|
| A&O Shearman | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Clifford Chance | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Linklaters | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Slaughter and May | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
Law Firm | Trainee First Year | Trainee Second Year | Newly Qualified (NQ) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ashurst | £57,000 | £62,000 | £140,000 |
| Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner | £53,000 | £58,000 | £125,000 |
| Herbert Smith Freehills | £56,000 | £61,000 | £145,000 |
| Macfarlanes | £60,000 | £65,000 | £150,000 |
| Travers Smith | £55,000 | £60,000 | £130,000 |
| Firm | Merger year | Known for in London |
|---|---|---|
| BCLP | 2018 | Real estate, corporate/M&A, litigation |
| DLA Piper | 2005 | Corporate/M&A, real estate, energy, resources and infrastructure |
| Eversheds Sutherland | 2017 | Corporate/M&A, finance |
| Hogan Lovells | 2011 | Litigation, regulation, finance |
| Mayer Brown | 2002 | Finance, capital markets, real estate |
| Norton Rose Fulbright | 2013 | Energy, resources and infrastructure, insurance, finance |
| Reed Smith | 2007 | Shipping, finance, TMT |
| Squire Patton Boggs | 2011 | Corporate/M&A, pensions, TMT |
Law Firm | Trainee First Year | Trainee Second Year | Newly Qualified (NQ) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ashurst | £57,000 | £62,000 | £140,000 |
| Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner | £53,000 | £58,000 | £125,000 |
| Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer | £56,000 | £61,000 | £145,000 |
| Macfarlanes | £60,000 | £65,000 | £150,000 |
| Travers Smith | £55,000 | £60,000 | £130,000 |
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