Thirty years inside legal. Not watching from the outside.

David Standard spent more than 30 years leading marketing at a senior level at some of the UK's most respected law firms, as well as 4 years at KPMG Corporate Finance as UK Marketing Manager. He has held Director-level roles at Eversheds Sutherland, Irwin Mitchell, and Leigh Day, and a partner role at Thompsons Solicitors. That is not a list of clients. That is a career. He has built growth strategies from scratch, rebuilt teams after crises, implemented martech stacks before the term existed, and navigated the sector through every wave of digital change from Yellow Pages to social media to AI.

Standard Consulting exists because law firms deserve better than generalist agencies that learn the sector at your expense. Every piece of work is delivered personally by David, not briefed out to a junior, not filtered through an account manager. If you are a CMO, a Managing Partner, or a BD Director who needs someone who has sat in your chair, this is what that looks like.

The IQ suite — HarkIQ, ClientIQ and SubsIQ — was built out of the same frustration. Law firms are full of technology built by people who have never worked in one. David believes client handling is the true differentiator between firms that grow and firms that stagnate. Every enquiry call is a moment of truth. HarkIQ was built because there was no way to know what was happening on calls coming into a firm, whether clients were being handled with appropriate care, whether compliance obligations were met, and whether handlers were converting. Now there is.

ClientIQ applies the same intelligence to corporate practices to manage key client relationships — nothing new there, but they always fail as there is never one single and easy overview for the data gathered from key clients. Now there is.

SubsIQ helps teams better manage the many submissions they make to legal directories. These independent industry reviewers are growing in importance as AI sources content from them to guide clients seeking legal solutions online.